On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Bryan Pope wrote: So should I be planning to desolder A bit of oft-repeated hardware-geek lore when faced with this prospect: first try to narrow down, if you can, which of the chips (or bank of chips) is causing the fault. Then, clip the legs of the chip(s) as nearly flush to the body of the chip as you can, leaving them soldered into the board. This is especially required if the board is more than about four layers - without the proper tools and not-a-small-amount of experience, you'll kill your mobo for sure otherwise. After you have removed the body of the defective chip(s) you can easily straighten the legs and solder a socket to them. Of course use care and a light touch in attaching the socket. I've done this numerous times, it's a lifesaver in this type of situation. Cheers John

One obvious comment. 'Bad RAM' means that the CPU couldn't read the same value that it wrote. This _might_ be a RAM chip, it might be a RAM controller problem, it might be a corroded trace to the RAM or to the controller, or.... I'd want to do some more tests before blindly swapping out RAM chips. -tony