Mixed mem size and brand issue

[lagger]

I am in the middle of a new build and have to retire \ reuse a few parts from my old northwood rig .. I put my ati xt1650 vid card into my kids p-4c system to upgrade it from the 9700 pro that was in it .. seperate issue but the ati offical drivers from the website wouldn't work .. endess reboot - black screen- reboot- Omega drivers fixed that .. anyway he has 1gb in 2x 512 sticks of crucial ddr400 in dual channel config .. I added 2 sticks from my old machine in the remaining slots 2x256 OCZ ddr400).. the system boots and all just fine but internet explorer crashes every five minutes (the rest of xp pro does not and I can restart iexplorer and run it for a little while again without a reboot) other programs weren't crashing, taking out the ocz ram fixes it .. is there a way to stabilize this ? the timings and all the bios settings on his Intel board are all standard (no OC)

 

[akhilles]

Burn this iso as image on a cd:

http://www.memtest.org/download/1.70/memtest86+-1.70.iso.zip

Boot it up & let it run for 5+ passes. If there's any error, something is wrong with either the ram or the bios settings.

You can mix & match memory of any size & brand as long as they're the same ddr. The ram will run at the speed of the slowest stick.

I would memtest 2 identical sticks at a time in different slots. If the problem persists, I would replace the small sticks with larger ones. 2 gigs are plenty for a kid pc.

 

[Mondoman]

The issue is likely that one or both models of RAM were sold according to manufacturer-sanctioned overclock specs requiring higher-than-DDR standard 2.5V memory voltage. See this post for more info: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/200599-30-memory-nooob-aarrggghh-timings#t1249881