Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Dell laptop issues. Ken to the rescue!(or another)

As the others have stated, it seems like the 2GB memory module has gone bad.

However, I have one question. You say you tried booting the laptop with each memory module installed separately. Did you try installing the 2GB memory module in BOTH slots on the motherboard and completing a boot test? This will confirm that the memory module is bad, and not the memory slot on the motherboard (which is highly unlikely).

Yeah I gave that a try and confirmed that the 2 gig chip is bad. Still not 100% certain why it won't boot with the 1 gig chip but we will see what happens when I get the new RAM.

Got the ram, no luck. Popped it in and pressed F1 to continue after memory change and get a black screen. can't get to boot menu with F8.

Downloaded windows 7 recovery disk, changed boot sequence, booted to disk.

recovery disk shows windows installation just fine. tried auto recovery and no problems found. tried system restore back to 11/26 and it went through but still no luck.

went to command prompt from recovery disk. changed to c:\windows
tried to type explorer.exe. windows pops up that file EXPLORERFRAME.dll is missing.

Copy explorerframe.dll off of my desktop and onto the laptop. (placed in windows\system32\. It asks to overwrite file (so it is there, thought maybe it is corrupt.) I press yes to overwrite.

Try c:\windows\explorer.exe. same error about explorerframe.dll missing.


tried reboot and still jsut a black screen.

Any suggestions from here?

Buy a Mac?







*gasp*
oh, no he di'int!

I assume you have another working machine with a CD burner in it, from the fact that you've made the recovery disc.

Get the Memtest86 ISO, and burn it to a CD. Boot from that disc and let it run through the test once (it'll take a while).

If that works out OK, I'd say that Windows is pretty hosed, and it's time to back up your data, format, and reinstall.

Well since I was finally able to get to a command prompt (through the recovery disk I downloaded today) I'm doing the following:

plugged in my external HD with my windows7 setup.exe file from school. Tried the "upgrade" installation option but it wouldn't allow it because it recognized I was booted from a startup disc and not actually windows.

Soooo.. I'm doing the complete reinstall. Hope it works will report back.

I wonder if that stinking ram chip was bad in the first place....

Thanks for the advice chris. If the reinstall doesn't fix things I'll try the memtest iso as suggested. I've already got everything important on this computer backed up, plus the windows installation from my school moves all of the documents into a windows.old folder.

Not sure if this is doing a complete reformat or not though. When I have installed from a windows xp disk in the past I have seen installation options that include "reformat".

The windows 7 install from my school has the two options mentioned previously:

"upgrade"
or
"reinstall"


We shall see what happens....

I always run that Memtest on all new RAM. It's nice to find a problem right away, rather than random crashes later on.

back up and running now!

After install was complete and everything was workign I took out the 2 new 2gig ram chips and put in the suspected old faulty ram chip.

memory error, no physical memory.

I guess I'm keeping the 2 2gig ram chips after all.

I'm not quite sure what happened but somehow my ram got screwed and my windows install was bad.

Any idea what might have caused this?


Either way, my wife will be glad to have her laptop back!

I'm guessing the bad RAM somehow corrupted the Windows install.