On 5 Feb 2004 11:31:12 -0800, wrote:

I have a Gateway Athlon 700 with 584MB of memory. 1 256MB SDRAM chip
with ECC, 2 128MB chips, non ECC. Got 2 256MB SpecTek Non ECC chips
from my brother from his old computer. Replaced the 2 128 chips with
the 2 256MB chips, figuring no problems would occur. Lo and behold,
boot the system up and get:

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report this problem as :
load needed DLLs for kernel
Please contact your support person to report this problem.

Take the 2 chips out, problem fixed, boots up fine. What about these
chips would make the system fail? They should be compatible with my
system.

Any help would be appreciated

thanks,
Oscar

Unfortunately many boards aren't extensively tested with all memory
slot populated, or perhaps those that are, are not redesigned if
that's a problem. In other words, simply because your board has 3
slots, and can theoretically accept X amount of memory per slot, you
can't necessarily assume it would run stable with all slots maxed out.

You could try entering the BIOS and relaxing, rasing the memory timing
numbers, or choosing "slower" or similar wording, but even that may
not help enough. Test the memory with http://www.memtest86.com,
ALWAYS, for several hours before ever booting to the OS, to avoid file
corruption.

You might also try different combinations, see if the system would
even run stable with only the pair of "new" modules in it. By "run
stable" I again mean running memtest86, not booting to the OS till it
at least tests ok at that.