[PLUG] Hardware puzzle of the day - desktop won't boot

[Galen Seitz]

David Fleck wrote:
...
> 
> Just today, as I was doing some maintenance on my daughter's machine, I 
> got it into my head to put one of her memory DIMMs into my stricken box. 
> It booted up immediately.
> 
> Damn.
> 
> Rich Shepard had suggested new RAM, but I ignored that because I was 
> convinced that the motherboard ought to respond, in some way - a beep, 
> something - even without RAM.  It turns out that's not the case.  I was 
> suspicious of the existing RAM, but foolishly assumed that the BIOS would 
> respond differently when given bad RAM vs. no RAM.  Live and learn.
> 

I think your assumption was entirely reasonable.  Given that the BIOS 
could temporarily use the cache RAM on the processor for stack, etc., 
I'm surprised that the BIOS was unable to detect and report a problem 
with RAM.

-- 
Galen Seitz
galens at seitzassoc.com