Persistent and various BSODs

Ran memtest again last night, this time with all 4 sticks, and it went through 4 full passes with no errors (it was on the 5th when I stopped it). I did contact Dell and it turns out I have another year on my warranty (had forgotten that I bought that). I'll work with them to try to resolve this, but will update here as needed.

I'm kind of wondering if one of them was just seated every so slightly off and when I put them back in (after blowing all the dust out) it maybe corrected things. Things went fine yesterday afternoon, after I put all 4 back in the computer. No BSODs or anything. It usually would have throw one in that time. We'll see.

Thanks again; the help was greatly appreciated.

Major update. I started testing individual memory sticks and while things went fine with slots 1 and 2, slots 3 and 4 gave me nothing but the 2-beep code that means the computer can't locate any RAM. So, obviously something wrong there. The good news is that Dell is going to take care of the problem.

I had decided to skip phone support and went for email contact. I figured that was the best way to get my point across without being interrupted by someone who is just reading a script. That's what annoyed me most when I tried calling them about this last year. This time I got incredible support from them. I initially told them that I was getting various BSODs at random times and they came back and asked for the stop code. I sent the stop codes and error messages from the last week and they said they would start looking into it. As soon as I updated them that slots 3 and 4 were giving me beep codes, though, they came back and let me know that they had gone ahead and scheduled a tech visit to replace motherboard, RAM *and* video card. Um, okay, you go right ahead. I'm not going to argue with that, especially if it fixes things.

So, support from Dell much better the second time around and much more responsive via email than phone, at least for me. My opinion of them just went up several points.

Said it before; going to say it again. Thank you for helping me out and for taking the time to look through the information I uploaded. You got me started down the right road to get things fixed.

You're very welcome.

I'm glad to hear that Dell will be making a personal appearance to fix your system. If they want to replace video card as well as mobo, let them do so!

Good luck to you and please let us know how things go.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

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Dell rep just left. Motherboard and video card were replaced, but he said that since it looked like the RAM that I had worked just fine and it was the slots, he recommended keeping the RAM instead of replacing it. The reason for that is a bad track record (with him anyhow) of receiving refurbished RAM on service calls such as this one. So, I took his advice. We'll see how it goes.

Computer has been running steadily for nearly a week no with no problems at all. Not a single BSOD since the hardware swap, so that was definitely the source of the issue. Just wish I'd been able to properly convey what was going on to the tech support person on the phone last year. Would have saved me a lot of headaches. Think I'll probably stick with email support from now on, if something like this comes up again.

Good to hear/read of a positive outcome.

It's nice when a plan comes together, isn't it?

Yes, it is. Also nice to have a computer that works the way that it's supposed to. I was beginning to feel like Blue Screens were just a way of life.