did i kill my 'puter

It sat unpowered for a year and a half in the corner of a climate controlled data center (60,000sf+).

This was a $$$ machine with all USA made gold plated connectors.

Sony stereo receivers were well known for that. The first repair step was to just resolder everything adding a bit of fresh solder to each connection. Next was looking for the infamous baked brown capacitor glue...

It was probably 8 years ago. Don't worry, the short MTBF ROHS crap will be catching up with us very soon...

I put the old 1GB stick back in and was writing down the message when the prompt to continue appeared, after about half the delay. There was no indication that a memory test was running.

Since I have to remove the keyboard to change RAM I'm not going to investigate this further, just giving you all a heads-up that it happens, at least on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop. I hadn't previously noticed a long delay when swapping up to 2GB memory sticks on my other computers.

jsw

Jim..you either have a bad stick..or the wrong speed/kind or combination, from the looks of it.

I had that issue not long ago here. I put in (2) 1 gig sticks and one was bad..and both were of the wrong speed. I took them back and exchanged them for good ones of the proper speed and that computer now works just fine.

Sometimes finding the proper ram configuration can be tough, particularly with some of the "older" machines

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

Every once in a while a blind pig finds an acorn too - but it is NOT a common occuurence.

I HATE doing repairs on lead free ROHS crap.

The "Dell from Hell" syndrome.

The warning message deceived you too.

When a menu prompt finally appeared I ran the BIOS diagnostics, which passed, and then booted into 7, which works fine. It's poor practice to leave the user wondering if the program has crashed or ended when a long procedure is running silently.

The new memory passes this thorough test:

jsw

Some motherboard makers gave those specific instructions. The circuits that I've seen had a resistor around the diode, and another diode in series with the DC input from the motherboard. At the microamps used by the CMOS based design, the forward drop is quite low. A Schottky diode will be even lower. Anyway, the RTC is now a licensed design in an ASIC. I haven't seen a motherboard made in the last decade that had a seperate RTC chip, or module.

A low grade hack, at best. The gold plating on memory modules is only a few microns thick, so by the time they need 'cleaned' there are holes in the plating. Doing failure analysis on components, and qualifying new components for a manufacturing process would really open your eyes.

"Pete C." wrote:.

Sure it does. That's why I've spent days replacing IC sockets in equipment.

AKA: Dude, you're going to hell!!!

My favorite was contact cleaner was Quiterol, which is long out of business.

That's a good way for cause ESD. Also, paper burnishes the contacts. Doing that to something where I worked would require the item to be scrapped for violating corporate anti static policy.

Yes, and Dallas is now owned by Maxim and they still make battery backed RTC modules, and more RTC chips than you'll ever need.

Thank you.

Thanks. :)

Erik, I have been replacing high ESR capacitors for over two decades. I first used the ESR function on a Sencore LCR meter in 1987. I now have the original Bob Parker/Dick Smith Electronics ESR meter. :)