Q: I've recently had a hard drive failure on my computer so i've opened it up, took out the old hard drive and installed Windows Vista onto another drive that was already in the machine. All went smoothly until i switched the machine off and tidied up the wiring, i unplugged the first memory module(i have 4x 1gig Corsair DDR2 sticks) and then plugged it back in. I switched on the machine and the screen is just blank. The machine sounds like its booting normally but no picture... I tried a CMOS reset, different monitor, unplugging everything except essentials and same.... However, i took the first stick of memory out and the machine boots fine, put it in, same problem. The memory was working fine before. I thought i may have shorted it when taking it out but the memory has a heatsink covering the components. i'm now running on 3GB of Single Channel memory. What could it be? I've tried a hard ATX reset also and tried a different graphics card and tried the other PCI-E slot(Its a Gigabyte GA57SLI S4 Tried switching RAM sticks, all work fine except when theres 1 in the first slot By not booting i mean no picture is going to the monitor at all... nothing. The 8800 GTX BIOS doesn't even show. All memory modules work fine as i've tried them all in the other 3 slots on the computer, but not when any of them are in the first slot. Yet it worked before. The OS is 64-Bit and its a AMD Athlon X2 6000+ CPU. The machine has worked with all 4 sticks in before and no matter which stick is in the first slot the machine still won't produce a picture on screen. I've tried switching the computer off, draining power and inserting just 1gig in the first slot and no luck
A: what you're saying tells me that the first slot is malfunctioning if all the sticks work in the other 3 slots. Check if there is any wiring problem to the first slot, or turn off the computer completely (that means plug out all power source) then reinstall the memory sticks.