Vostro 1500, memory problems?

I have the Vostro 1500 with Vista Basic and upgraded the memory to:
2 x 1GB (outpost deal for $22.99 AR) and seem to have multiple lock-ups, applications which stop responding.

The memory in question is Crucial CT12864AC667 or Samsung M470T2953EZ3-CE6 (1GB SODIMM 128Mx64 DDR2PC2-5300)
The memory is being recognized and memory tests report no failures.

I did a clean Vista install to no avail.
Downgrading to the standard 2 x 512Mb solved all above issues.

Any ideas?

 

maybe you shouldnt mix memory sticks liek that.

 

I can't say I disagree, but if the two sticks are of the same specification there's no reason they shouldn't work together. Hell I've got DDR RAM of different speeds in my desktop working fine.

Do the sticks work if you just install them one at a time?

 

Wow, that's the oddest thing...

What are the supported clock and CAS latency for both?

In my current Desktop, I have two 512MB Sticks mixed with different supported CAS and Clocks (I suspect one of them is actually faulty), and I occasionally (scratch that, often) have game crashes.

So... It'll work, but it's just not optimal.

 

Sorry,

I think I confused some of you guys. The sticks are identical (one side has the Crucial sticker and the other side the Samsung sticker). I guess that Samsung made these for Crucial. I have the same issue if I only use one stick at a time.
This was the response from Crucial (was not very helpful)

Hello, my name is Tyler . How may I help you?
Like2ct: I have purchased some memory for a dell vostro 1500 and was wondering if I bought the correct one: crucial p/n CT12864AC667
Tyler : Did you purchase this directly from Crucial? If so, please provide the order number or e-mail address used on the order, and full part number found on the module.
Like2ct: No bought from fry's (outpost.com)
Tyler : We cannot guarantee compatibility for third party suppliers.
Tyler : Is there anything else I can help you with?
Like2ct: Not really
Tyler : If there is nothing further I can assist you with, I?d like to thank you for visiting Crucial.com. Have a great day.

When using the memory advisor at the Crucial website it doesn't call out this stick but it does call out sticks with the same specs (at least that's what I think).

 

Hey, I have exactly the same problem!

I got my Vostro literally right before I left for school and changed out the memory with those same Crucial sticks the from Frys. My original sticks are in the mail now (being sent to me from home), so I can't check yet if the problems go away if I put in them in, but from the sound of what you did, they should. I've also run memtest86+ (7 times), with no errors.

I did a clean install of Vista, and there didn't seem to be any problems, but there's isn't much to play with on a clean machine to see if it locks up. It definitely started after I reinstalled the Dell drivers, though. But I installed them one by one, after reading the descriptions and didn't see anything that should conflict with memory. Ideally, I would go back and find out if it was a specific driver by uninstalling/reinstalling/restarting and playing around with it, but I haven't had time, and I'm not even sure if that's a problem.

It's odd, because I can use Internet Explorer and Firefox for quite a while without problems, but it'll suddenly go "not responding" for about a minute without apparent reason. It happens much more often while using Windows Media Player, skipping around a movie in Zoom Player, or just using Windows Explorer to browse around files, though. But even when it decides to lock up, the mouse and I think the sidebar still seem to work, the mouse spinning its busy signal. The computer still records the clicks I do, and just suddenly follows the commands I clicked after the minute or so it up (minimize, pause, etc.) When its working, it works fast and well, but when it decides to consecutively keep locking up, it can get very irritating very quickly.

It's a bummer Crucial doesn't look like it wants to help. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

I had the same problem, I never upgraded ram
I disabled scheduled defrag and everything seemed to be peachy afterwards

 

My issues seem to be solved.
I tried to work with a stripped down Vista version but still had the locking up (not responding issues for about 1-2 minutes). The strange thing was that the problem became worse when I increased the amount of ram memory. Also the computer was really slow.
Here're my guestimates (I did not keep track of this)
2x512Mb I got at least 2 lockups.
1x512Mb plus 1x1Gb 2-4 lockups a night.
and with 2x1Gb every 4-5 minutes a lockup.
As I was about ready to return this pos I decided to downgrade to XP Pro and reinstall all the drivers (All the XP drivers are on the Driver disk which is included with your laptop).
Also I had to slipstream my XP version because it didn't have the SATA drivers included (this produces an error that there's no harddrive to install XP). Dell has the Sata drivers on their website (R154200.EXE) and using a neat utility called nLite (xxx.nliteos.com) incorporates this in my XP version.
I will wait for a Vista service pack before I try Vista again.

Thanks,

 

Run MemTest86.

 

I have same problem on Vostro 1500 with pauses/freezes after upgrading memory to 2GB RAM purchased from Dell. Dell replaced RAM and problem still occurs. Put 1GB RAM (2X512MB) and problem goes away. Dell now saying that this is a known HW problem and wants to replace notebook.

Has anyone found resolution to this problem without replacing notebook?

 

(Eh. This turned out too long, but since I typed it already, I'll leave it. Basically, I found out I was having iaStor errors, so turned off AHCI.)

I seem to have solved my problems, but I wanted to wait a while to see if it'd stick and so far it has *crosses fingers*. However, this might not help others, because I found my problem wasn't with my memory. Sorry.

K2yip's comment about defrag was my first real push to look at something other than the memory causing a problem. I opened up "Task Scheduler" to see if anything (like a virus scan or something) was taking place when it got stuck, but didn't find anything running that wasn't already running fine before. Then I tried "event viewer" and noted that every time it hung up, there was a Event ID 9 iaStor error.

Looking up iaStor errors led me to a couple places where people were complaining but about RAID configurations in Dells. At any rate, both AHCI and RAID are handled by the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (from here MSM), which led me to this link, citing possible problems with the MSM and Vista (worth a look for yourself). I updated to 7.6 (the Vostro comes with 7.0) but to no avail. Oddly, in the readme, it didn't show our controller (HEM/HBM? I can't remember anymore), under the list of IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers supported, but when I opened MSM 7.6, it recognized the hard drive and said everything was fine. Under "Device Manager" it showed the driver showed updated to 7.6, but the laptop still kept freezing.

A look through the MSM readme revealed "Intel(R) Chipset Software Installation Utility" should be installed, which I found here, under "Get latest utility." Installed that, reinstalled MSM 7.6, nothing. Another rereading of the MSM readme showed that I was supposed to install the driver during OS installation (as per the first link's instructions for Vista) before doing the auto install I had been doing, but I didn't feel like reinstalling the OS again. I did find HOWTO: enable AHCI mode after installing Windows, but the chipset for the Vostro is ICH8M (so mobile version), so I'm not sure if it would work (although there doesn't look like any reason it shouldn't). I also wasn't too impressed with the "benefits" of AHCI, since actual performance was negligible, and laptops don't make too much use of hotswapping and definitely not multiple drives. Anyway, even trying that method, the laptop started freezing as soon as I turned back on AHCI mode.

Conclusion: If I installed the Matrix Storage Manager 7.6 the proper way, with an OS reinstall, it might possibly solve the problem, since I had done a clean install of my OS already. Even if Dell did configure it properly like they should have, they still only had the MSM 7.0 installed, so perhaps that was the problem. Still, I doubt it.

Solution:I entered Setup when the laptop booted and turned off AHCI mode (under Onboard Devices to ATA mode). Since then everything has been fine.

Note: The link to MSM 7.5 in the first link I gave actually points to the latest MSM 7.6. You can read the readme there without downloading everything. And if you're dumb like me and didn't figure it out yet, "Device Manager," "Event Viewer," "Task Scheduler," etc. can be found just by typing after you click the Start Button.

So, I still have those Crucial 2GB in my lappy, and I'm very glad to have them. Hope this helps someone.

 

Thanks Janerl for sharing your solution, changing AHCI to ATA mode does fix the problem (In my case I bought two matched pair crucial ddr2 667 from frys).