I recently tried installing a stick of 256 in slot 2 on my presario5000. I have 256mb in slot 1 and 2 empties. When I started the machine my monitor had colorful horizontal lines, then went black. I shut down, pulled the new RAM and tried it in another computer with no problems. Is there a common cause for this? The motherboard is a UWAVE2 with Duron processor. RAM is pc133 out of HP Pavillion.Thanks for any info. I'm having a little bit of fun learning this stuff.

I might be able to give you a few ideas.

Sometimes 1 ram stick is best fitted in the slot recommended by the hardware manufacturer. If it's a single stick.

Sometimes you might need to enter bios and set the timings. There could be a safe setting or you can google or experiment. It should be safe, though I think this should give you a BSOD if wrongly configured.

Then there is getting the stick properly seated or the slot is filthy and need to be cleaned.

A few hopefully helpful suggestions.

edit
Obviously the ram needs to compatible with the mobo.

We need the exact model of the presario 5000 series in question, if I remember correctly, some of these would only take PC100 or PC 133 with a CAS latency of 2.0, whereas most PC133 is CAS 3.0

Computers running of PC100 and PC133 were picky about what RAM they wanted to see, density, double and single sided modules were some of the other considerations.

Thanks for the replies. The computer is a presario 5uvme2 that has had XP Home installed. Both sticks of RAM are IBM PL300 256MB #33L.3076. They say 32x64 PC133. Thank again for any info.

Here is a link to crucial with your exact ram.

It uses CAS 2.0.

Here is the link to HP's page on the machine, it originally came with PC100 SD RAM.

Check on the ram that you are installing again, it sounds like they are mismatched, or one is partially bad.

here are some tools for seeing what's going on

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html


http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php







here's an old one that I got started with

http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/ctspd092.html

Looks like your computer can only handle PC100.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...;product=239426

Okay it would seem, you cannot even expect to run anything than special desined compaq intended ram.
Do a google about compaq ram.
For all I've seen PC133 should be fine, but as stated on a few boards -

I have no idea how much truth that hold, but personally I'm glad I've been warned before about staying away from compaq.
It is sure to have it's uses, just not if you want to turn in into a costum build somehow.

If it wasn't for all this, I would go with what oldf@rt says. Try reinsert. Needs a bit of force sometimes. Try each at a time separate.

Hope to shed some light.

some cheaper pc133 cas 3 ram won't run at cas 2 for pc100

most bios's allow relaxing the setting for cas 2 by changing to cas 3

that's where it's best to find out the spd values for sticks of ram