topic Re: Vista unstable after memory upgrade in PCs & Accessories

Vista unstable after memory upgrade

WASonline — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:48:45 GMT

Hi, I'm having some problems with my Vaio FE41E after I upgraded the RAM memory to 2GB. I've got a dual boot with Windows XP Professional and Vista Business. Vista is running very unstable (bluescreens and random application crashes ). XP is running fine.

I also ran some tests on the memory with Memtest (I ran it for about 2 days without errors), so I am quite sure the memory modules are not faulty.

So I wanted to check how it would run with the memory on single channel mode and/or with higher memory timings.

Is there a way for me to turn off memory dual channel mode? I checked the BIOS but it seems to be locked or very limited. Does anybody know another mode or a way to unlock the BIOS or have another suggestion to solve my problem? Thank you.

Re: Vista unstable after memory upgrade

Blencogo — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:45:52 GMT

Your FE41E does not support dual-channel memeory or EEC memory. What specification memory did you buy? Was it DDR2 PC2-5300 or older?

If XP works OK, are you sure the memory is the problem?

How long have you been running Vista Business?

What do the Bluescreen messages say?

Re: Vista unstable after memory upgrade

WASonline — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:51:07 GMT

Your FE41E does not support dual-channel memeory or EEC memory. What specification memory did you buy? Was it DDR2 PC2-5300 or older?

If XP works OK, are you sure the memory is the problem? 

How long have you been running Vista Business?

What do the Bluescreen messages say?

Why wouldn't the FE41E support dual channel memory? That seems quite strange to me, because the chipset (Intel® 945PM express) does support dual channel DDR2 memory. And I know it doesn't support ECC memory. I bet ECC memory wouldn't even fit. I replaced the original memory with 2 Kingston 1GB PC5300 DDR2 modules.

With the complexity of today's computers, you can never be 100% sure. The memory probably has something to do with the problem, because Vista ran pretty good before the upgrade. It could be anything, maybe a bug which occurs in the chipset driver with my type of memory or maybe a bug in Vista? I don't know, right now I'm just trying to troubleshoot the problem.

I've been running Vista Business for about 1 week now. A dual boot with Windows XP. I bought the laptop about 6 months ago and ran Vista home premium for about 1 month. Then I decided to upgrade the memory, because I didn't really like the performance of Vista. After that I got the same random errors and blue screens, so I decided to install Windows XP. This was also because some programs I needed for my study didn't run under Vista. About a week ago I installed Vista Business (MSDN Licence), to see how it would run.

The bluescreen messages seem to be completely random. They vary from driver errors to NTDLL errors to corrupt system files. I also ran Checkdisk a couple of times, each time it repaired a couple of errors. Although I'm pretty sure the hard drive isn't the source of the problem because XP is running fine on another partition.