(no subject)

[dolari]

I am so so so so so stupid.

So damned stupid.

I tested the motherboard with memory and without when I was trying to figure out what was failing on the system.

I never bothered to test the memory chips individually.

I have three sticks of memory, two PC2100 256MB chips and 1 PC2700 512MB chip. I took out the PC2700 stick to see what I could slavage for my parents computer and...well...the system came right up, no blue screens, no reboots. I'm tyoing this enty on it right now.

Sure enough, plug the PC2700 on it in on it's own without the PC2100 chips, and you get one long beep. Bad memory.

I should have checked the chips individually first - I never did, just checked it for beep codes with and without the full memory. I'm a doof. THIS is why I've been Level 1 tech support for ten years.

But now I'm down to 512MB...not comic killing, but comic delaying.

Comments

[drkbish.livejournal.com]

Eh, don't beat yourself up over it. You wouldn't believe how many times I've overlooked the obvious when trying to fix an issue. A perfect example would be a few weeks ago when our main fileserver kept crashing due to overheating. I went to the colocation on a Sunday to get it fixed, and noticed it was a tad warm in there, but didn't think much of it as I'm very insensitive to temperature changes. I called HP, they determined it was the mainboard, and had someone out within a couple of hours to replace it.

I went home, and two hours later, it crashed again. I drove back, got to the colocation... and when I entered saw another customer there with one of the colocation's techs. Turned out my put-aside observation was the key: it was 95 degrees in the datacenter!

I felt a bit stupid then, too. Like I said, we all miss the obvious sometimes. :-)