two bad 256mb ram sticks

[sonnyp]

I bought my computer a while ago and I had two 256mb XMS3200 400MHz ram sticks....well I ruined about 3-4 80GB western digital hard drives because the person I was getting my advice from had some spares, so when my hard drive went bad he gave me a new one or I bought one off him. Little did I know it wasn't the hard drives having problems. I thought I had a cooling problem since the fans on the front of my computer blow soft. I moved my hard drive to a different spot and took the case sides off and placed fans on both sides. I STILL killed a hard drive. At this point I was out of money and I couldn't take it to a technician. After letting it sit for a while I got a job and got enough money to get it fixed. I took it to a repair shop and the guy tried some solutions, replacing disk drives, new xp copies, because I was trying to format a new disk. Well, I tested the ram sticks seperately and they both had a problem formatting the brand new drive. So I took it back to him and he put a new ram stick in and loaded it up. It almost finished installing windows xp when it froze. He repeated 2 more times and it did it again. So he placed a new drive in the machine and it loaded up perfectly fine. He tested my ram sticks on a different machine and realized they were both damaged causing my hard drives to be corrupted. I want to know if I can send both my ram sticks in and get them replaced since they have been causing problems since about 6 months after I got them. Even different technicians couldn't figure out what the problem was at first, so for a while I gave up since I became broke from trying different solutions and paying for peoples Diagnostics. I am running on a 256mb replacement stick at the moment until I can hopefully get these replaced by Corsair. Please respond and tell me what I can do.

[RAM GUY]

Please with just our XMS module installed and reset the bios with the Clear CMOS jumper and then enter the bios setup and set the following settings and work your way up from there:

CPU Freq: 166 MHz

System Performance: User Define

Memory Frequency: 100%

Dim Voltage to 2.7 Volts

Resulting Frequency: 166MHz

Memory Timings: Manual/User Define

SDRAM CAS Latency: 2.5T

SDRAM RAS to CAS Delay (tRCD): 3T

SDRAM Row Precharge (tRP): 3T

SDRAM Active to Precharge Delay (tRAS): 6T

Then test them one at time with http://www.memtest.org. But you would have to run the memory in sync with your CPU with this platform.

[sonnyp]

I've taken them to 2 different technicians and they both said the ram sticks were bad and it was ruining the hard drives. The computer wouldn't get past the beginning screen most of the time and if I got lucky it would let me open BIOS but freeze as soon as the screen came up. The issue was never that the settings were wrong, considering the first technician tried different bios settings. Those were almost exactly the same settings I originally had, maybe exactly but I don't remember, when I put the computer together. Also, they ruined every single hard drive that they were plugged in with. They ruined a brand new western digital 80gb hard drive from just trying to format it with windows. The computer wouldn't even start or load windows. And I am not going to try to fix them with this new hard drive because I am not taking the chance of it ruining the 5th hard drive I have put in it.

[RAM GUY]

Please follow the link in my signature “I think I have a bad part!” and we will be happy to replace them or it!