Wont boot up

[fractalzero]

So about a week ago my friend gave me 5 RAM sticks he had laying around. Out of those five, 2 worked. Put them in, turned on PC. Boots up but nothing appears on screen. Removed the 2 sticks, tried to boot a few times and got on. Next day, back to the first one. The monitor says "Disconnetor" so I assumed it was the GFX card. Took it out, put it in a diff. slot and changed the cable to
the monitor. Nope, still doesn't work.

Anybody know whats happening here?

PC; msi k8n sli platinum mobo, amd athlon 3200 and nvidia7600gt and 512mbram. 450w PSU. It's not great but i mostly edit videos etc

[OvRiDe]

No video is a common issue with bad RAM. I would try each stick individually to see if it solves your problem. This way you will be able to identify which stick is good and which are bad.

Good luck.

[mDust]

Just out of curiosity, are all the sticks of RAM you were given the same? I'm guessing they aren't. What brand, size, and speed are they? Putting an old 256MB slow, 'junker' DIMM in a system with 512MB of faster RAM could decrease performance by running all the RAM at the slower speed. Unless they are 1 or 2GB sticks, or the current 512MB is already slow, it might not be worth the small upgrade. More than 512MB will greatly improve video editing performance though...I'll bet most of your work is running off of swap space.

[Luke122]

No video is a common issue with bad RAM. I would try each stick individually to see if it solves your problem. This way you will be able to identify which stick is good and which are bad.

Good luck.

+1 on this.

[fractalzero]

I've tried all sticks including my original 512mb and none of them have worked.

[dr.walrus]

Sounds like it's fried your mobo! Personally, I didn't think this was possible until a friend had this happen to him a few months ago with some brand new Kingston RAM... Ouch!

[billygoat333]

I had this happen to me on an older computer. put in a stick of ram and it shorted out causing some wonderful blue smoke and ozone. needless to say the motherboard was fried.

[Luke122]

The worst failure I've seen recently was a mobo that died, and took an E8400 with it. We tried the cpu in another board, and got nothing. Tried a new cpu in the second board, and it toasted too!

The problem leap-frogged.. cpu kills board, board kills another cpu, that cpu then killed another board. I've never seen anything like it, but in the end we lost the original E8400 and EVGA mobo, a new Asus P5Q-EM mobo, an E7500 cpu, and a P5K-CPL mobo.

[billygoat333]

The worst failure I've seen recently was a mobo that died, and took an E8400 with it. We tried the cpu in another board, and got nothing. Tried a new cpu in the second board, and it toasted too!

The problem leap-frogged.. cpu kills board, board kills another cpu, that cpu then killed another board. I've never seen anything like it, but in the end we lost the original E8400 and EVGA mobo, a new Asus P5Q-EM mobo, an E7500 cpu, and a P5K-CPL mobo.

that is some epic fail. lol

[fractalzero]

After reading this thread a while ago I came to the conclusion that basically, my PC was generally ****ed. Today, I read some threads on a different site and it says "unplug your mouse". Mouse wasn't plugged in, but keyboard was. Unplug keyboard and it comes on! Just waiting for my relation to burn me an Acronis boot manager and I'll be happy (:

technology confuses me sometimes