Mixed RAM speeds causing problems

cdfreelancer

New Member
Yesterday I purchased Medieval 2: Total War. After installing it I started a new game. To cut a long story short, the game often CTDs which, interestingly, is what happened with its predecessor, Rome: Total War (Which uses the same graphics engine).

I checked the Total War forums, did some research and found that the likely cause of the CTDs was the fact that my RAM sticks are different speeds. The recommended course of action was to remove one of the RAM sticks. The original stick is 512MB DDR 2100 and the more recent stick is 512MB DDR 3200.

So anyway, I decided to remove the PC 2100 stick, leaving the 3200 stick in place (The 2nd slot in my motherboard from the left). I then rebooted my PC and waited until I got to the screen that asks me to enter my password. Neither the mouse or the keyboard worked! I checked that they were connected properly but they still didn't work. The mouse pointer didn't move and nothing happened when I typed. Not even the 'num lock' light came on when I pressed it.

I thought that this might be due to the fact that the RAM stick was in the 2nd slot from the left so I shutdown the PC, put it into the first slot and rebooted. This time it was even worse: The screen remained black and my computer unit made lots of random bleeping noises. I left it like this for about 30 seconds before once again shutting my PC down (By switching off the power at the wall).

I then replaced both sticks into their original slots and now my PC starts-up just fine.

However...

Something seems to have been adversely affected by this process. Whenever I scroll down a webpage it does it incrementally, in waves. It's hard to explain... Previously the webpage would scroll in a continuous motion but now it does it in several clunky stages. It almost reminds me of how my PC behaved just after I installed windows and before I updated my graphics drivers.

My questions are:

1. What could be causing this strange behaviour?

2. What should I do about it?

3. How can I get my system running on just one of my RAM sticks without causing problems?

4. Anything else I should know?

Thanks for any help!
 
What were the beeping noises? They are codes that tell what the problem is on the motherboard.
 
Apparently there are over 3 million combinations of mobo beeps. I couldn't begin to tell what order they came in.

Update: I just installed (reinstalled?) the correct driver for my video card and now everything seems to be working OK so ignore questions 1 and 2.

I have a further question:

5. What caused me to need to reinstall the driver for my card?
 
Yes. My RAM sticks are different speeds and this can cause problems with the computer game I want to play. All I want to do is run my system with just the one stick but for some reason my PC wont have it. What can I do?
 
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It shouldn't do anything...Even though they run at different speeds with the specs, the motherboard sets them both to the speed setting of the slower stick. Now that you have reinstalled your drivers for your graphics card, do you still have the same problem?
 
Issue resolved. The CTDs were being caused by zonealarm running in the background. Now the game runs fine when I disconnect from the internet and shutdown all unnecessary processes.
 
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