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Could Bad RAM Cause This?

lexidobe
By lexidobe
in Troubleshooting
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My friend just gave me a Compaq Presario CQ50-130US laptop. The problem is that it always turns on, but does not boot up or show anything on the screen. It turns on, fan starts up, hard drive light flashes for less than 1 second and does not go any farther. It will stay running, but does not do anything other than run the fan and light the power light. The first time I tried starting it, it started to load Windows just fine, but froze about 3 seconds into the Windows Vista startup screen. It only started up 3 other times besides that. It loaded Windows those 3 times. I tried different RAM and it started up fully the first and second try in a row, but now I cannot get it to do anything, even with different RAM. Could that be bad RAM?

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Well,if you tried booting it up with a different ram and it still didn't work, then it's not the ram...
Check the HDD on a different computer, see if its alive.

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Well,if you tried booting it up with a different ram and it still didn't work, then it's not the ram...

Check the HDD on a different computer, see if its alive.

The hard drive works. I get nothing on the screen. It does not even light up at all.
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The hard drive works. I get nothing on the screen. It does not even light up at all.

Could be that the motherboard has died, not entirely sure though, I've had a similar issue twice with a desktop, but I assumed that it was the motherboard, and well changed that and it worked.

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Typically to troubleshoot problems like this I will remove all components possible and then add them back in one at a time. You can removed the memory, hard drive, video card(if you have an integrated option to switch to), even optical drive. Then try to boot, if it boots and just gives you the error about all the missing hardware then you know it was one of those components. Start puting them back in one at a time, and rebooting in between. When it fails to boot you have found your failed device. I have had video cards, hard drives, and memory, all cause similar boot issues to the one you are having. If none of this works, power supply can be another possibility, if you have an alternate to use for testing purposes you could try that if all else fails. Good luck.

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Typically to troubleshoot problems like this I will remove all components possible and then add them back in one at a time. You can removed the memory, hard drive, video card(if you have an integrated option to switch to), even optical drive. Then try to boot, if it boots and just gives you the error about all the missing hardware then you know it was one of those components. Start puting them back in one at a time, and rebooting in between. When it fails to boot you have found your failed device. I have had video cards, hard drives, and memory, all cause similar boot issues to the one you are having. If none of this works, power supply can be another possibility, if you have an alternate to use for testing purposes you could try that if all else fails. Good luck.

 

This. If the computer completely fails to post it will often be the motherboard though, in which case the laptop is pretty useless (which well, let's face it, it already is as it's a Compaq from the Vista times).

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Get into the BIOS and "Load Defaults" before trying much else. It could simply be that the settings got scrambled.

A sieve may not hold water, but it will hold another sieve.

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Typically to troubleshoot problems like this I will remove all components possible and then add them back in one at a time. You can removed the memory, hard drive, video card(if you have an integrated option to switch to), even optical drive. Then try to boot, if it boots and just gives you the error about all the missing hardware then you know it was one of those components. Start puting them back in one at a time, and rebooting in between. When it fails to boot you have found your failed device. I have had video cards, hard drives, and memory, all cause similar boot issues to the one you are having. If none of this works, power supply can be another possibility, if you have an alternate to use for testing purposes you could try that if all else fails. Good luck.

 

Well you can't do that with this laptop. All you could do is the RAM and hard drive.

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U could just check the ram with memtest86...

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Get into the BIOS and "Load Defaults" before trying much else. It could simply be that the settings got scrambled.

As stated, I CANNOT get into the BIOS, as the BIOS logo does not come up, let alone the screen even lighting up. The laptop's screen does not work, and to confirm that, I tried a desktop monitor and it did the exact same thing.
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Does it have another video out that you could use to see if its a monitor issue first?

 

And to answer your question, Yes. Bad ram can cause a computer to act as if it started but it doesnt post. Had to RMA the ram out of my server because it would do something similar.

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UPDATE: I just now noticed that the RAM slots say "1.8V" on top. I am using 1.5 volt RAM. Could that be a problem? That might explain why it worked fine 3 times after changing the RAM with 1.5v modules but then died again... Did I kill the RAM?

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