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Be careful when replacing high end memory
Once upon a time you had a heatsink on the CPU and that was it, not even a fan. These days it seems that a fan or a heatsink is required for the smallest imaginable flat surface. In fact not even that, as I’ve seen heatsinks for capacitors on some motherboards.
Now, this doesn’t normally cause any problems apart from disapproving stares from co-workers wondering why a small helicopter appears to have been started up in the office.
But there is one big problem. Heatsinks make great hand holds, attractive ones at any rate, even if actually they shouldn’t be used as such. This happened to me the other day when fitting some memory to a computer. It was quite high end so there were the obligatory heatsinks but as they matched the colour of the memory slot I didn’t mind too much. As you can just make out the heat sink rises above the actual circuit board. Ever so slightly but no less significantly.
If you’ve ever changed RAM you’ll know that it requires a little bit of force to get it into the appropriate slot. Being in a slight hurry I just pressed on the first available surface, which happened to be the heatsink.
Turning the computer on produced those dreaded BIOS bleeps indicating a problem with the memory. I took it out and had a look. At first I thought that it was just a case of the heat sink coming away from the chips. Sadly the heatsink had taken the memory chips with it. Not something I can repair.
So there’s my cautionary tale.
Always insert memory by pressing on the circuit board. Not the heatsink. And that probably holds for CPUs as well.
I never expect about this.. thanks :D
posted-by Forex Trading Easy | April 3, 2009 4:24 PM
That's the first time I have ever heard that. I have removed and replaced this sort of RAM more times than I can count. Having said that, I will certainly take more care from now on. Thanks for the heads up.
posted-by Computer Repairs | April 3, 2009 9:41 PM
If you have ever changed a RAM?. Actually no, but I think it's a very interesting topic. I work in Directorio Cusco located in the country and the city Peru-Cusco is a wonderful. I would like more information on RAN
posted-by naida | April 3, 2009 9:52 PM
WOW! That's the first time I've ever seen this and I've replaced lots of memory.
Even more, if that was Crucial Ballistic memory it must have been a bad stick. As far as I know Crucial is a good brand name.
posted-by Daniel Aloy | April 10, 2009 10:20 AM
The noise has gotten out of hand in cases. It sounds like a 747 is taking off. It's tough to build a quite case today.
-Rob, Consultant:
posted-by Rob | April 11, 2009 3:20 AM
@Daniel Aloy I don't think it was a bad stick, just a bad installer!
posted-by Tim Smith | April 14, 2009 9:57 AM
Great and timely post! Thanks so much for the heads up on this.
I am presently shopping for memory to uppgrade my Dell Dimension PC and have not installed memory chips in a long while.
I certainly will have your advice in mind when I finally get my chips at a good price and install them.
posted-by jose | April 15, 2009 9:22 PM
Whilst replacing ram once I managed to break the little white end clip handles but the rest of it stayed in allowing the ram to remain in place hope I wont have to take it out again.
posted-by blacksheep | April 21, 2009 11:02 AM
great info. Never knew such details although i already changed memory couple times already. But changing the memory, you should always do it carefully as you dont want to make any mistake that could made your RAM or com broke. Thanks for sharing this info.
posted-by Melayu Boleh | April 21, 2009 12:43 PM
Thanks, Really very useful topic on hardware field, I did not heard before.
Thanks,
posted-by Larry M. Wong | May 9, 2009 8:44 AM