Installing 2GB of RAM

I have an ACER Aspire D150 running XP SP3, and today I bought a 2GB stick of Mushkin DDR2 PC5300 667 MHZ SO-DIMM. According to CPU-Z, the latency on the existing 1GB stick was 5-5-5-15, which matches the stick that I bought.

I replaced the 1GB stick with the 2GB stick, and the machine booted fine. It was much faster, and the My Computer properties reported 2GB of RAM. Everything was fine until I shut down. When I rebooted later on, the boot menu showed up claiming that my machine had not shut down properly, even though the shutdown went all the way through to power-off. I booted normally. Everything came on, then I got a split-second BOSD and a reboot.

On the reboot, everything came up very slowly. After a few moments of trying to do some diagnoses, the BOSD came back, and the system rebooted.

This time I did a hard power-off, waited a few minutes, then powered on again. I entered the BIOS and looked around. It reported 2Gb and there was nothing I could actually change, so I booted normally. This time, I got the boot menu again, and once I rebooted using the last known good configuration, the system booted in, it was very slow, and ultimately it hung.

So I swapped the 2GB back to the original 1GB stick, and everything went back to normal, working fine. So, what did we learn, Dorothy? The bus isn't defective, and neither is the original 1GB stick, as evidenced by the fact that everything is working properly. It can't be the BIOS because there aren't any changeable values and the BIOS detected the 2GB of ram properly. The latency matches the specs of the original 1Gb stick.

So... any ideas on how I can keep from losing 50 bucks since I can't return it, nor could I in good conscience sell it if it is defective. Help!

 

Why cant' you return it? It seems pretty obvious it is bad, though you might try it in another box to be sure. Any seller should refund or replace a defective product, it is the law.

 

I guess my thought was, is it defective? Or is it just incompatible. They won't take it back if it has been opened and there's nothing wrong with it. I don't have another box in which to try it.

 

try running this
http://www.memtest.org/

 

Having been opened is not a reason to refuse a return on defective merchandise. Just a couple of months ago, I was upgrading a client's RAM with sticks purchased at Best Buy. I bought two sticks, one of which was bad. I took them back, they tested them in store, and replaced the bad one as well as gave a 10% refund for the troubles (due to the clients insistence, not mine).

Bottom line, a product comes with an implied warranty under purchase, if it doesn't work, it must be replaced or the purchase price refunded (shipping not included).