Baraka_Guru

Hi,

I'm having some trouble installing a new RAM chip I bought. What irks me about my trouble is that I was anal about making sure I got a chip that was compatible, and now it seems I'm having trouble with it.

I have the ASUS P4S800-MX motherboard, and
I bought a Kingston Value Ram 512MB DDR PC3200 CL3 184-pin DIMM chip

The new chip is technically faster than my current (non-Kingston) one, but the 512mb size matches. Note: I bought a faster chip because it is on sale at half price (CDN $50); all other chip speeds are regular price.

I looked in the mobo user's manual, and it only says to install DDR chips that are 184-pin and it lists the sizes that work in the slots. It says absolutely nothing about RAM speeds.

The mobo has only two slots, so I was sure to get the 512mb chip to essentially "fill out" the system to 1gb of RAM, knowing full well that I'd have to replace one or both if I wanted to go higher than 1gb.

Can anyone shed some light on my situation? It seems I've run into some serious system instability: I tried to reintall Windows because I've been having trouble with it to begin with, with a .dll error every time I restart the OS. I noticed some instability when running the new chip, but it did start Windows and a diagnostic program said the chip was installed and all seemed dandy, but I started getting some program errors.

I went straight to a reinstall, thinking that it was a collection of factors that may have caused the instability, rather than JUST the new hardware. However, when the Windows installation was commencing, it kept coming up with errors as it was having trouble installing some of the files and they had to be skipped. This happened a number of times. Can RAM problems cause this?

I have since removed the new chip and now I'm trying to recover my system with the original chip only. Hopefully I can at least get back to where I started, but this still leaves me holding the bag: will I be able to get this chip to work somehow, or will I need to exchange it with a chip that has the exact same capacity and speed as the original one?

Any help would be greatly appreciated... All I wanted was a smoothly running system!

UPDATE: it seems that having removed the new chip also removed the problem of Windows setup not being able to install certain files. So far, so good... my fingers are crossed. It does seem that the new chip was causing this problem... but is there a way to get the damned thing to work?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot