Fixing stuff

[damerell]

Today, after waking up from the night before, we fixed things. pm215 and I took apart my Dreamcast and bent the power connector back into position, which worked surprisingly well.

I opened up rei, fixed a jammed CPU fan (no wonder she was crashing), but discover that memtest86 returns errors if all three DIMM slots are populated, but not if two are irrespective of the slots and DIMMs in use, so she's down to 512Mb from 640Mb - anyone got any ideas about this?

Last I puzzled over my new bike trailer and its demented mounting hitch. Sigh.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

I suggest that the bus drivers for the memory are unable to provide enough current to swing the signal lines reliably when loaded with 3 DIMMS.
If you can increase the drive voltage to the memory, try that. Otherwise try getting lower-power DIMMs, or DIMMs with a lower chip count. If you desperately need 640MB, you could also try turning down the memory clock speed and/or the aggressiveness of the memory timings.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

It's odd that this has only manifested itself now, although since the only thing I do on rei is play games and they crash periodically anyway, it seems possible that perhaps it's always been a little flaky and the jammed CPU fan was entirely to blame for the recent problems.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions; next time I have the lid off I may slap the 128Mb back in and fiddle with the BIOS.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday!

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

We must meet up for a drink some time. I know I said this some months ago but I remain unorganised and whenever I'm in London it's for something else...