Tag: memory

My PC is Frozen: How to Diagnose Faulty RAM


Article first published as My PC is Frozen: How to Diagnose Faulty RAM on Technorati.

Does your computer frequently jam up? Do you seem to be getting a lot of blue screens? You may have faulty memory.

In this article I will try to explain how to diagnose your own faulty memory modules. The process is relatively simple, can save you money and can also be a valuable learning experience if you haven’t had much to do with computer repair before.

The first part of diagnosis is of course being able to recognise the symptoms, which include:

  • The computer freezing up to the point that there is no mouse or keyboard input possible at all.
  • A ‘blue screen of death’ followed by immediate shut down or restart.
  • A failure to boot often accompanied by a series of beeping noises.
  • Crashes during memory intensive tasks such as photo or video editing, gaming etc.
  • Crashes and restarts during Windows installation.

I had the misfortune of experiencing some of these symptoms a few weeks ago when my computer began to freeze during different tasks especially while listening to music on Winamp for a while or within about 5 or 10 minutes of playing World of Warcraft or OFP: Dragon Rising. Luckily for me the fix was easy, all I had to do was remove the side cover from my PC and apply a bit of pressure on each of the memory modules to ensure that they were seated in the DIMM slots correctly. If you don’t know what a memory module or DIMM slot looks like then click on the image above left.

If you suspect that you have faulting memory then ensuring that the modules are pushed properly into the slots would be the first thing that I would try as this is normally the problem 20% of the time. Make sure you check the conditions of any warranty you may have on your PC first as removing the side cover and tampering with components may void it. Continue reading “My PC is Frozen: How to Diagnose Faulty RAM”


1 Simple Tweak To Double PC Performance

Shifting your page file off the boot partition on to a secondary hard drive to increase system performance.

So I’ve made a pretty big promise with that headline but believe me I plan to deliver with this one but first a bit of theory. Stay with me! It isn’t difficult, you might even learn something and once you see the performance increase of this little tweak for your self you will be thankful you took the time to read more.

I also highly recommend reading this article on boosting your computer’s performance as well.

The Theory
If you own a computer you would have heard of memory or RAM. Memory is often measured in megabytes (mb) or gigabytes (gb) and it is where your computer stores information required for your computer programs and services to run.

If you already know all of this or are completely trusting you can skip this whole section and move on to the “How-to” section.

Programs running on your computer will use up some (or all of, in some cases) your computer’s memory, some programs and services use up quite a lot of memory while others barely use any. As memory usage increases computer speed and general performance decreases. Continue reading “1 Simple Tweak To Double PC Performance”