I've inherited an aging Dell Inspiron 5559 that had a failed hard drive. I replaced it with a 1TB Crucial SSD and it is back in the land of the living and doing well. While in the upgrade and repair mode, I decided to upgrade the RAM from 8GB to 16GB. I purchased two Crucial 8GB modules. They're the ones that Crucial said worked with this laptop and I've confirmed that all the specs match my original RAM in every way except for the capacity. It should have been a very easy upgrade, but the memory isn't recognized for some reason. When I check the BIOS logs I see I'm getting an Undefined event code 0x03808164, which from what I can find seems to be a memory fault. I've tried reseating the new RAM, but it makes no difference. I've tried the new RAM in various combinations with the old in either slot, and singly in one slot, trying to narrow the issue down to one module or the other, but the laptop doesn't seem to like either of them in any combination that I try, and I've tried about everything that I can think of. The only thing that works is to completely remove the new RAM and reinstall both of my original RAM modules. When I do that, everything boots perfectly.

Crucial isn't selling this RAM directly anymore, so I bought it through Newegg, but it wasn't sold by Newegg. It looks great and looks exactly as it should, but I'm sure most counterfeit products do. The user is named Techjunkie and they have good reviews, but again, that doesn't always mean a lot.

Now I'm wondering if the more likely issue is these two sticks of RAM or my laptop. Unfortunately, I have no other compatible device that I could put the RAM in to check them out.

Any ideas? Has anyone else experienced a similar issue when upgrading the RAM in their Inspiron 5559?

Thanks.