Harry's Blog

I've built a few PCs in my time but never quite got to grips with the various complicated settings for memory. Fiddling with the bios settings to try to get non-working memory to work is hardly my strong point.

At the weekend I picked up some cheap PC3200 (400Mhz DDR) memory for my PC. That meant I would have three sticks of 512MB. Now all you regular system builders will know that's not an ideal figure as three sticks stops the memory working in dual channel mode.

That's not so important for me as the two cheap sticks in the PC already weren't running in dual channel mode anyway. But I did spend several hours on Saturday frustrated while trying to get three sticks to work together.

My PC was playing awkward buggers, not only would it not work with the three sticks but sometimes it'd refuse to work with just any one of them. Finally I discovered that snapping a stick into the third slot tended to slightly unseat the other two sticks of memory, as long as I gave all three sticks a little shove once they were installed the PC would boot fine.

And then I came across the next problem. The third stick meant that the memory wouldn't run at 400DDR, instead it was only running at half that. After a bit of frantic Googling it seems that my mobo will run the memory faster than 200 and I should be able to get 333 - the equivalent of PC2700.

But when I tried to set this speed in the bios the PC wouldn't get as far as loading Windows. Yes it would get past posting, but it would always hang before I even got a chance to sign in to the operating system.

Today I've solved the problem. And in the usual arcane ways of PC fiddling it didn't require much in the way of technical expertise. All I did was swap the sticks around in the slots. It really shouldn't make any difference. But it did. The PC is now running the memory at 333DDR. Which is much better than I was getting yesterday.

Now if only City Link would hurry up delivering the new graphics card.