I think I have narrowed down my distaste for computer hardware to motherboards and memory. I wasted my night installing two new sticks of RAM into my computer to increase its total to 2048 MB. After four hours of troubleshooting, flashing my BIOS, configuring my BIOS to run at its slowest speed, I have determined my fourth DIMM slot is causing the errors. All four sticks of memory are good and can be used interchangeably. I am currently running with three sticks, 1.5 GB of RAM.

I think we tend to dislike what we do not understand. Everything I know about hardware I have learned because of situations like this one. Hardware is not something I wanted to learn, but was forced to learn when systems crash. Memory and motherboards seem to be the root of my trouble.

The problem
I have an ASUS AV7880 Socket A motherboard. My RAM is Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2PT, basically two sticks of 512 MB, and now I have four. The list of memory tested and supported for my motherboard does not show this exact stick of memory, but it does show "512MB CORSAIR CMX512-3200C2" while mine is "512MB CORSAIR CMX512-3200C2PT." Does ASUS really test every product configuration out there? For the past year my two sticks of 512MB CORSAIR CMX512-3200C2PT have performed without any trouble.

I decided to increase RAM from 1GB to 2GB to allow me the freedom to run more applications. My mobo supports up to 4 GB of RAM. To make a long story short, I verified all four sticks of RAM work by swapping them out in different configurations. I finally narrowed down my problem to be located with DIMM_B2, or the fourth DIMM slot available. After flashing my BIOS with the latest and configuring my system to run at the slowest possible speed, I gave up and called technical support. They really had nothing more to offer that I had not already tried. An RMA of the mobo is in progress.

The good news is that they will send me a new mobo and I can return the old one. I would not want to be without my computer for three weeks, although it would probably be good for me. If you conduct a Google search on "I hate hardware," you will see there are many people out there who share my sentiment. I tend to enjoy learning by doing, but man, “I hate hardware.”