I'm guessing I should've worn the wristband

[metaverse]

Hey all,

I was thinking about getting a new laptop and after doing a couple hours of research I decided I was going to fix and upgrade the laptop I have right now.

Its an ACER aspire 1520 ... I got it around mid 2005ish ... It came with an AMD Athlon 64 CPU , 1.8ghz and 512mb RAM. It sat around not doing much for a couple years.

But - I've been using it as a general all purpose workhorse for the past 2 years or so leaving it on for days at a time downloading , ect ...

At some point it started to randomly shut down when doing CPU intensive tasks like playing video games or streaming videos off of the net like youtube...

So I did some research and found that its more than likely overheating and seeing as my fan was still running it was most likely due to the thermal grease drying out and needing to be replaced.

So I bought some of the Artic cooling remover and also the artic 5 silver thermal grease compound. I applied it and sealed the computer back up.

Fired up the computer and all was well ... I decided to run M.U.G.E.N. (fighting game) seeing as this seems to crash my comp the quickest and it ran fine for a solid 40 or so minutes ... CPU was running at 100 percent pretty much the whole time but the comp didn't shut itself down cause the temp didn't rise high enough to do damage ... So I shut the game down and decide that i'm now going to REPLACE THE RAM. This is at around 3am ... I look over at the anti static wrist band and say "eh , the chances of it going are slim , i'll be alright."

I had bought 2 1gig crucial ram sticks to put in my comp , they're the right kind and compatible ... So I put in the 2 ram sticks , close it back up , flip over the laptop and hit the start button ...

The green light around the power button starts glowing ... The little lightbulb icon on the screen starts glowing but there is ABSOLUTELY NO SOUND or VIDEO SCREENS firing up , absolute silence...

Its like its paralyzed and wants to run the power through the comp but nothing else is reacting ...

I replaced the ram with the Single 512 Ram stick I was using 3minutes prior and the same thing ... light around power button turns on but nothing else goes ... I have to hold the power button down for a good 3+ seconds before it'll the light will shut back off too ... I then switched it to the second ram slot and tried that , nothing ...

I then tried re-seating the RAM again a couple times so that I made sure it was secure. Still nothing ...

I then took out all the RAM and attempted to power it up and BAM ... it does the same exact thing , light comes on around the power button but there is absolute silence... so its like the computer isn't acknowledging the RAM is in there at all ...

the ram is compatible and the same voltage as the previous samsung ram that was installed stock so its not that ...

I then , out of desperation, decided to unplug the CMOS to see if somehow something happened there ... I let it sit for 10 or so minutes with no power hooked up and no battery. Plugged it back in , tried to start it and NOTHING.

any help is appreciated

 

[NWPhotog]

Still sounds like the ram is not seated correctly. I would take it to a trained technician.

PS I have yet to run into a HSF that isn't working because the thermal paste is dried out. I have run into many that an amateur applied the paste incorrectly.

 

[metaverse]

Hi NWPhotog,

Thanks alot for the input ...

Since its saturday I can't bring it in until monday - over the next day or two i'd like to solve this on my own if possible.

If you were to offer any advice on this - where should I start? I've tried seating and reseating the ram multiple times. True my laziness got the best of me with the wrist strap but how much more technical can seating ram really get?

At this point i'm thinking maybe i put too much thermal paste on , although I did attempt to only cover 50% of the cpu , focusing on keeping it in the middle and then slightly spreading it a bit. I used the artic 5 which seems to be a bit thick so purhaps that is the problem?

I did end up running a game immediately after applying the thermal paste and starting my comp. While monitoring my cpu it was running at 100 percent , and i ended up running it this way for a solid 30min. to see if my comp would shut itself down. I could feel the heat coming out of the vents a good deal - I remember thinking that maybe I should've given it a bit of time to break in and settle on the CPU before cranking it up to 100 percent ... Do you think its more likely that I applied too much thermal paste or that I cooked the CPU by cranking it up to 100 percent for that prolonged of a period? I'm going to double check on seating laptop ram but its only slide in the pins portion, make sure they're secure and then push down on the other end of the ram to get it through the clips that end up keeping the ram parallel with the motherboard.

Any advice or links on reseating the laptop ram?