I had a client this week who wanted a RAM upgrade for their older PC. I was told it was DDR4 RAM and the clients son wanted to fit it as he as an interest in IT. So, I purchased 2x 8GB DDR4-3200 RAM chips and sent them to the client. The client called to tell me they hadn’t worked – the machine wouldn’t boot with the new chips installed but worked fine with the old. A quick site visit showed it wasn’t a faulty chip but a compatibility issue – the PC was older than I expected, and the existing RAM was DDR4-2133. My suppliers had DDR4-2667 in stock, so two more chips were ordered and dispatched. Cue another phone call as those also didn’t work.
Now most IT providers would have given up at this stage and told the client they needed to replace their computer. However, experience has shown that this should have worked so there must have been another issue at play. During my site visit, I had noticed the motherboard BIOS version was F2, and a quick Google search showed this was from 2015. The most current BIOS version was F23b, from 2018, and one of the interim updates was around RAM compatibility. I worked remotely with the client’s son to upgrade the BIOS to the latest version and got him to reinstall just the new RAM chips and… voila! One working machine with 16GB RAM. I then got him to install the old chips alongside the new. A computer which started with 8GB RAM how has 24GB, is no longer subject to random slowdowns due to RAM being fully utilised, and I have one very happy client.
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