Newbie needs very basic help

[Prometheus]

For Christmas I recently recieve an HP pavillion a840n as a gift from my parents since my older brother would be taking our computer with him to college. Up until this point he had maintained most of the computer things in the house with the exception of our network which I also knew how to maintain. After he left I began using my own computer and decided to install additional RAM on my brothers advice. I bought 512MB PC2700 DDR (which my brother pointed me too) and installed it no problem.

It worked allright for the first hour or so then I began to recieve error messages from all over the place telling me that a program had to shut down due to errors most involving the memory. I looked around online and have seen several references to problems nearly identical to mine (same memory and similar HP pavillion machines) that have been solved by altering the Bios RAM settings. While I am famaliar with the theory of BIOS I have no practical experience. I currently know how to open the BIOS on my machine (F1 at start up) but I see no memory options in the advanced section.

Does anyone have any advice, know of any good guides for simple BIOS modifications, or can give me some idea of what I am doing wrong? Does this even sound like a BIOS problem or did I screw up along the way?

[NickS]

I'm not familiar with this machine, but what BIOS options are there? Do you have anything that refers to "Chipset" ? This would normally be where the timing parameters are.

[KachiWachi]

HP Support does not list an a840n...only an a840.nl and a t840a.

Are you sure as to what you have there?

[Prometheus]

I must apologize, I made a very important typo there. Its a804n not a840n, Sorry. I went to the hp page for this and looked for there bios updates, of which they had one. I downloaded and attempted to install it but midway thorugh installation it gave me an error message that said it was unable to install BIOS.

Also in the BIOS screen I can currently look in there is no options like chipset. The only options that look close to it are an I/O manager for managing parepherials and a hardware moniter for monitering temperature. If it is any help the BIOS revision is 3.23 01/25/2005.

One other thing is the BIOS Main screen displace that my 2 memory sockets are full (both with 512 MB RAM) so it seems to know they are there, but the errors continue in most aplications (most stable seem to be things like iTunes and Microsoft Word, least stable are things like Firefox and Guildwars [MMORPG]).

[KachiWachi]

Can you try running MemTest86 or MemTest86+ to test your system and report back with your results? Thanks.

[Prometheus]

I ran MemTest86 with both the new and old RAM modules in and got over 2200+ errors before I stopped the test (it had run for about 25 minutes) following the suggestion of the ReadMe, I traded the places of the 2 RAM modules and got only about 220+ errors (but only running it for about 22 minutes this time), the old RAM module alone was able to go for the 25 minutes I gave it with no errors.

So does this mean that the RAM is bad or just that it doesn't mesh with my computers ware?

Sorry for the long response time, I had several final papers to do this week so I took the new RAM out and just opperated from the old one (this works just fine no matter what).

[KachiWachi]

It could be many things...

Bad RAM Module
Bad Cache (CPU or Mainboard)
Improper Mainboard Settings

If I understand you correctly, the original RAM module passed on its own...correct? Will the new module pass on it's own as well?

[Prometheus]

Yes, the old RAM passed by itself. No the new RAM did not pass. Something kinda odd happens when the new RAM module is tested by itself, I start up and MemTest starts up then the screen goes blank for a fraction of a second and im back starting up again. This happend maybe twice then MemTest started. The ram module past the first test then started erroring left and right.

[KachiWachi]

Bad module then, or not the right type of RAM (layout, etc...) for the machine in question.