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I think I know why my work doesn’t want me working with customers at the front counter anymore. A customer came in with the computer and told me that it didn’t post. I looked inside the case and saw an Asus P4PE with three sticks of double-sided 512MB DDR RAM installed. He claimed that he must have a dead board or CPU because the board did not POST.
As I was hooking his machine up to the test bench, I asked him if he had tried to invoke a beep code by removing all of the RAM or by removing the video card. He said no. I then asked him if he tried to use the computer with only one of the sticks of RAM installed. He said no. So I’ve got a guy here that doesn’t know the first thing about troubleshooting, but he’s going to build his own PC. Great!
Next, I asked him if he had read the manual. He looked at me with a rather perturbed look on his face and said, “Why?”
“You have too much RAM in this machine, sir.” I respond.
“But Asus advertises this board as being able to support 1.5GB and that’s what I have in it!”
I grabbed an Asus P4PE manual, flipped it to page 2-11 and turned it towards the customer so he could read it. “If you look here in the middle of this page, you’ll see that the board has three DIMM slots, but only supports up to four banks of RAM. A double-sided stick of DDR is considered two banks. It even says so right here in case you didn’t already realize that. If we look at your machine, you’ll see that you have three double-sided sticks of RAM in there. That would make six banks.”
I pulled one of the sticks of RAM out of the machine; hit the power button and the computer fired right up.
“Well,” he said, “If the 512MB sticks of RAM are double sided, how am I supposed to get 1.5GB in the machine?”
I responded, “Single sided sticks of 512MB, that’s how. We don’t sell them and I haven’t seen them myself, but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. You might want to ask Asus, but seeing how their web site only shows 256MB sticks of RAM as being qualified, I’m not too sure that they’re going to have that much to say.
He shut the machine down, grabbed the PC and stormed out of the store.
Now, I typically enjoy helping people. But I am a little short on patience when I’m trying to help someone that can’t help himself. Read the manual and put forth just a little bit of effort and then working together to solve a problem can potentially be a joy.
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