I've been having an intermittent problem with my machine hanging up during a forced restart.It seems to lock up before the monitor comes on and this is similar behavior to another machine I've had.It was fixed by reseating the RAM board.Now I've tried this trick,and several others,to no avail.My thinking is that the RAM board is having a problem and I'd like to try popping in another board,seeing as how they're not all that expensive....$45-50 for 256M of PC133 SDRAM.If it works,then everything is cool.If not,then I've got 512M of RAM in a machine that will start if allowed to sit for several hours after being turned off.My question here regards different brands of RAM.Is there clearly a better brand/manufacturer?Thanks in advance.

Yes, there clearly is a difference between manufacturers. Since we're talking about PC133 though, just about any brand will do, unless the board takes registered RAM. Otherwise, generic brands seem to work quite well in most older boards.

The most reliable PC133 is probably the Crucial (Micron) brand. Other people may have differing opinions, but normally you can't go wrong with Crucial.

The motherboard in this case is MSI K7T Pro-2A,with 1.2 T Bird processor.The whole thing is about 2 years old.

JohnS,

Welcome to PCGuide!

I noticed you said something about the system starting again after several hours of being turned off. This suggests a heat problem. Have you checked out your fans, cleaned out the dust and generally checked for overheating lately? I would do that before investing in more RAM.

Good luck,
Budfred

After seeing how much crap can accumulate in the fans and heat sinks on other machines,I've been pretty good about doing a D&C (dusting and cleaning)on my computers.On this one,CPU has a decent sized heat sink with a fan mounted on it.SCSI HDD has a heatsink with fan.Case has a fan in back.Power supply has 2 fans.They all seem to be working OK.

If you have a way to monitor temps, you might want to try that anyway and possibly try the trick of running your system with the case open and a fan blowing into it. I believe I have seen people here referring to your CPU as one that runs hot. Or just try the RAM.:)

Budfred