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April 17th, 2008 10:00
XPS M1330 Vista 4GB Memory dump Issue?
After 2.5 weeks of owning my XPS M1330 with 2GB of memory I decided to upgrade the memory to 4GB. While the Dell BIOS shows 4GB of memory installed Vista refuses to boot up, and does a blue screen of death showing a memory dump occurring.
If I keep the 4gb of memory installed Vista keeps dumping the memory, and restarting. So to work around this vista issue I pulled one of the 2GB memory sticks out, and put one of the 1GB Dell memory sticks into it to get 3GB of memory. With 3GB of memory I can get Vista to boot up, & use my laptop again.
Since my laptop is still very much new I'm leaning towards doing a fresh install of vista with the 4GB of memory installed. I also heard there is a memory program on the Dell DVD that came with the laptop which I plan to try out first.
Anyone else had this issue?
DeathRider
549 Posts
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April 17th, 2008 13:00
Other thing can be one of the memory sticks is faulty.
Another thing to check is to see how old your BIOS is. You may want to update it. The latest one is A09. Don't forget, the latest BIOS includes all the updates/fixes of prior BIOS versions, so you won't have to worry about skipping previous ones. Looking quickly through the BIOS updates, I didn't see anything about correcting memory issues, but some are listed as *recommended*
Since you have memory dump issues with 4GB, make sure you do it with a memory configuration where your not having an issue.
desiguy2447
3 Posts
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April 17th, 2008 13:00
Thanks for the information... I saw the new Bios last night so will update it. Also going to try to get SP1 installed on the laptop. After all that will try going to 4gb again see what happens.
fuzzy_llama
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April 17th, 2008 15:00
Hi, the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) could be anything. It is simply a system crash.
A "memory dump" is when the operating system "dumps" all the information held in the memory into a minidump file. This file, thus, contains all the information of the system when the system crashed for diagnosing later on. This is because after the system crashes it has to reboot, and after rebooting the memory is wiped out making it impossible to find out the cause without this minidump file.
The correlation you are seeing may, in your case, be due to a faulty RAM stick. Investigate this by trying to boot the system in different configuration with the sticks (try one, then try the other, try one in one slot, try it in another slot, etc). Or it could be the slot in the motherboard that is faulty. Because RAM is Random Access Memory, it's possible that using a faulty stick you may still be able to load the system fine, making it hard to tell if it's faulty or not. You can run the Dell memory diagnostics in this case, which will perform a large amount of random tests in hopes one of them will error if the stick is faulty.
Assuming your memory is not faulty then write down the STOP error code the screen gives you and post it here. Or contact Dell to have them analyze the minidump, which sometimes can pin-point the exact file causing the BSOD.
eSolutions
317 Posts
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April 17th, 2008 19:00
desiguy2447
3 Posts
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April 18th, 2008 10:00
It turned out that one of the two 2GB memory modules is defective so will be getting a replacement 2GB module of memory.
Thanks for all input & help.