Ranting Canuck

About three weeks ago I started to have some really odd issues with my main computer. The computer was blue screening at random intervals and just rebooting at times as well. One thing that I decided to do was run memtest since most many blue screens are caused by bad memory. As it turned out I did have some bad memory, some how the two one gig memory modules in my computer had both failed.

I ran out to and picked up a four gig of memory, cost me $140.00 or something like that, memory is cheap. I also decided I would RMA this now faulty memory to Kingston, Kingston has a life time warranty on most of their memory products.

I was expecting maybe a bit of run around on this since I did not have receipt etc for when I purchased the memory but I figured it was worth a try. So I called Kingston, I was on the phone for maybe 5 minutes they just wanted the model number of the memory. They gave me two options I could ship the memory back to them and they would ship out new memory. Or I could give them a credit card number and they would cross dock the memory too me, with the added benefit they would pay to ship the memory back. I choose to do the cross dock, next day my replacement memory arrived. Kingston had sent a commercial invoice and all information I need to ship back my memory.

I must say this is probably one of the easiest RMA process’s that I have experienced. Before this experience I had generally recommended Kingston memory to my clients, now I only recommend Kingston memory.

So I am now running six gig of ram in my main system and XP only sees 3.5 gig of memory. So I figured I would give Vista a try again but this time the 64 bit version, more on this later.

While the new memory did resolve the blue screen issues I was having my computer was still rebooting at random intervals. I reinstalled the OS and was still having the issues; reinstalling the OS pretty much eliminated it being a driver issue. So this pretty much left a couple of possible culprits for causing this, bad Motherboard or more likely a bad power supply.

Sure enough I discovered the fan on my power supply was stopping randomly, which I presume caused the CPU to overheat and reboot. The power supply failing explains why I had a motherboard fail and then bad memory; the power supply had damaged them. Luckily it did not damage any of my hard drives, CPU or Graphics card.

The power supply that failed was Antec Smart power 450 and I replaced it with a Antec Neopower 550. I really Antec power supplies, I find them to be the most reliable on the market, but sometimes they can fail also as I experienced. I like tike the Antec Smart power and Neopower series since they are modular power supplies. So you only connect the number of power connectors that you need for your computer which reduces cable clutter in your computer. This reduction in cable clutter makes for a cleaner looking case and also improves air flow which helps with cooling.