Dell Inspiron 640m video problem (and others)

Hello at all,

it's my first post here, and I have just need of a little help.

Yesterday, toghether with my friend, we upgrade the ram of her Dell Inspiron 640m. It had only one module of 512 MB, so she bought another one from S3+.

After the upgrade appear the problems. After she uses the notebook for an hour, on the screen appears several black stripes, and the the machine crash.



We check the memory with memtest and they're all ok, we check the notebook with Dell diagnostic utility and It founds no problems.
We also update the graphics driver (i945GM) and the bios (fron A05 to A10), but nothing change.

It might be a sort of incompatibility between S3+ ram and the other module, or between S3+ module and the notebook (especially with i945GM graphics)?

Thank you for your help.

 

Maybe a faulty RAM module. Since GMA900 uses system RAM for video memory, I guess that kind of video corruption can also happen due to bad RAM. If the problem persist, then try removing the newly installed RAM module. However, I don't know why memtest failed to detect any errors.

 

It is possible that during the upgrade you might have knocked an LCD cable slightly loose. Make sure you did ALL the tests under MemTest, because at least one of them is about a three hour test but you have to manually start it.

I'd strongly consider RMAing the RAM though if the problem does not persist when you pull the module out.

 

Thank you for the immediate answers.

It's the same thought that i did... she runs memtest (from windows, version 3.5) over an hour on about 700 MB of ram. I'll suggest to her to run memtest dos version, in order to test all memory without SO interference.

She upgrade only the module on the bottom of the notebook, no the one under the keyboard. There is no LCD cable there.

As I said before, she runs memtest 3.5 from windows ( link). It covers 700 MB of ram in about 20 minutes, after those it continues ad retest. I used this test other times and it's very sensible.

With one module, the system works fine, if I remember correctly what she said. So RMA it's a concrete possibility, but for now we try to fix the problem if possible.