Memory Stick Degraded after installation - what happened?

[Brondahl]

Hi guys,

Yesterday, I upgraded my RAM (from 4 x 2GB, to 4 x 4GB).

• 
  ■ POSTed fine; booted fine; seemed to run fine.
  ■ ~ An hour later got a BlueScreen. Rebooted and it all ran fine. I decided to let it slide until it happened some more.
  ■ It ran fine for most of the day; maybe 14 hours, and I started to think the BS was a fluke.
  ■ Then it BlueScreened again.
  ■ Then it BlueScreened 2 minutes after the reboot.
  ■ Then it sat in a reboot-2 minutes-BS loop, for maybe 5 iterations whilst I tried to fully save all data and find advice forums.
  ■ Then it started to crash during OS boot.
  ■ Then it failed to pass POST.

At this point I opened the tower up, and tested each individual memory stick.
3 of the 4 sticks of RAM would pass POST just fine; 1 stick consistently hung on the VGA phase (i.e. immediately after the DRAM phase).


2 questions here:
A) It seems like the stick of RAM actively degraded over the course of 24 hours? Is that perception correct, or is something else going on? Assuming it is degrading ... what the hell? That seems really fast. Is that a thing?

B) As part of the crashing-a-lot-whilst-booting phase, it managed to changed the BIOS boot settings so that it was trying to boot from a different drive.
Is that a normal thing to happen?
Is it something that the BIOS did in some sort of self-defense, because of the boot-crash-loop?
Did the BIOS settings get corrupted by an unlucky reset moment?


Many thanks,

Brondahl

 

[jaslion]

Hi guys,

Yesterday, I upgraded my RAM (from 4 x 2GB, to 4 x 4GB).

• 
  ■ POSTed fine; booted fine; seemed to run fine.
  ■ ~ An hour later got a BlueScreen. Rebooted and it all ran fine. I decided to let it slide until it happened some more.
  ■ It ran fine for most of the day; maybe 14 hours, and I started to think the BS was a fluke.
  ■ Then it BlueScreened again.
  ■ Then it BlueScreened 2 minutes after the reboot.
  ■ Then it sat in a reboot-2 minutes-BS loop, for maybe 5 iterations whilst I tried to fully save all data and find advice forums.
  ■ Then it started to crash during OS boot.
  ■ Then it failed to pass POST.

At this point I opened the tower up, and tested each individual memory stick.
3 of the 4 sticks of RAM would pass POST just fine; 1 stick consistently hung on the VGA phase (i.e. immediately after the DRAM phase).


2 questions here:
A) It seems like the stick of RAM actively degraded over the course of 24 hours? Is that perception correct, or is something else going on? Assuming it is degrading ... what the hell? That seems really fast. Is that a thing?

B) As part of the crashing-a-lot-whilst-booting phase, it managed to changed the BIOS boot settings so that it was trying to boot from a different drive.
Is that a normal thing to happen?
Is it something that the BIOS did in some sort of self-defense, because of the boot-crash-loop?
Did the BIOS settings get corrupted by an unlucky reset moment?


Many thanks,

Brondahl

It probably was already defective and because it was in use it started dying faster and faster. Nothing you can do about it. Time to claim your warranty.