Older computer memory trouble

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Matt Krass

Not true. I've done it, like I said, I have the RAM stick on my desk in the computer lab at school, it's charred on one chip, the board had the jumpers set to 133 and it was 100 I believe, it didn't burn out right away, but after a few minutes.

You're describing something like a short or severe overheat on one of the chips (though 100 -> 133 shouldn't do that, and SDRAM doesn't normally overheat in a single chip only); he's talking about the contacts themselves being damaged. This is usually due to a crooked DIMM, but it's possible (though rather unlikely) that he somehow managed to jam it in backward.

Originally Posted by Matt Krass

Newer computers would fail a POST, but AT style stuff was stubbornly determined to run, even if it was blowing itself out in the process.

Very, very few AT motherboards used DIMMs. He's likely got an ATX board. And I think that the generalization is a little bit of a stretch....

As for the voltage, a 5 V EDO DIMM (usually from a Mac) will have a different notch pattern, that would render it impossible to insert into a PC motherboard properly, unless you've somehow got a board which was designed to support both voltages and pinouts (I've never heard of such a thing).

By the way, don't put the good DIMM in the bad slot; in fact, don't put anything in there.