On Tuesday 06 January 2009, [email protected] wrote:
> I've been running a T61p with maxed (4Gb total across 2 slots) for
> around a year now without any issues. A lot of people I know with
> this machine have noted its extreme flakiness with the power
> connector causing mobo problems.. This is the first I've heard of
> memory issues, weird. Hopefully no blue smoke. :-)

No smoke.  The machine remained in the docking station for two days 
straight without being moved; one day it worked well, the next it was 
crashing on bootup.  Still works fine as long as I only have one 
stick of DRAM in it.  Worked fine since about April of last year.  I 
haven't had any issues with the power connector thusfar.

Yeah, it's really weird.  Several other people have had the problem, 
though, so it's not just me.  But that said there's no guarantee that 
you'll run into it -- with any luck you never will, but I've reported 
what I found in case you do.

One additional piece of info -- setting the BIOS startup 
to "diagnostic" in my case bombs when it gets to about 824M and 
generates a succession of short beeps in the pattern 3-3-1-2.  I 
don't find that particular combination listed, but 3-3-1 is listed as 
either for an issue related to DRAM or the System Board.  And where 
the same behavior results from swapping the DRAM sticks around, that 
leaves only one choice.

Apparently there's also a site that explains how to find a single bad 
RAM chip on a stick of RAM to allow replacing the bad chip, however 
that doesn't seem to be the problem in this case, and even if it were 
the chips are a BGA package (Ball Grid Array) and thus there's no 
access to the solder leads because they're under the chip itself.


  -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group                  http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm)                         MHVLS Auditorium
  Jan 7 - Ruby on Rails
  Feb 4 - TBD

Reply via email to