Hi, people, I really must apologise for all these posts recently, things are just not going well.

So story so far, installed extra 1GB of ram to system with 256mb, so altogether I have 1280mb, this messed up my graphics card (Nvidia fx 5200) for some reason. Somehow managed to get graphics working again. Now the thing has started freezing, and there is nothing I can do except turn it off and back on again, takes about 10 minutes before freezing occurs and I have no idea whats wrong.

The system is a dual boot with XP which has excepted the ram without issue and is running fine.

Thanks

Did you try the recovery mode from boot,or the option recovery a broken system,the one you see booting from cd?

You might have bad RAM. I bought 2 ⨯ 1 GB DDR2-800 RAM for $20, and my computer froze constantly! I finally decided to run Memtest86+ and sure enough it was bad. After swapping RAM with my friend, there haven't been any freezes and his RAM passes Memtest.

run memtest86 on boot to check memory, report back if there are errors.
boot in safemode if necessary, reinstall 5200 drivers

Does each stick of RAM have to be running at the same speed?

Thanks, I'll run memtest now, really hoping it isn't the ram, and as I say XP seems to be working fine.

Sorry I don't really understand this question as such, the ram was bought to match what was already there, and I was told it didn't matter about the sticks being of different memories, but that said.I don't understand ram full stop. I've always got by matching up the ram exactly and ordering.

Hi, well there seems to be a problem. Memtest seems to have stopped at 38% with 238 errors. And apparently at 213.1MB, but I really don't know what that tells me except that my ram needs replaced.

But what do I do now, as the test seems to have stopped?

Do I need to restart and test each stick individually?

Sorry for being so clueless.

Just to le 1f40 t you know, I scanned each ram stick individually and encountered no issues, so put the both back in and the memtest worked fine so presuming one of the sticks just wasn't seated right.

Am away from home now so can't actually report if the freezing has stopped or not but I'm pretty confident it will have.

Glad you got it sorted!!