RAM module randomly stopped working

Posted by nhinkle on Super User See other posts from Super User or by nhinkle
Published on 2010-05-31T15:28:37Z Indexed on 2010/05/31 15:35 UTC
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Filed under:

Hardware

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laptop

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memory

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ram

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failure

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron e1505. It came with 2x512 MB of RAM installed, and about a year and a half ago I decided to upgrade it to 2x1 GB. I bought two 1GB memory modules from newegg and installed them, and all worked fine.

Just last night my laptop was working fine; this morning I booted up and there was a BIOS warning saying "amount of system memory has changed". I tried reseating the modules, but that didn't fix it. Then I removed each one individually, and determined that one of the sticks appears to no longer be working. This happened very abruptly - I hadn't noticed any problems which might have been indicative of impending failure.

Does anybody have any clue what may have caused this, and if there's any hope of making it work again? The memory only had a 30 day warranty, so I can't RMA it.

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