Old 2006 desktop came back from the dead

M

mouse23004

New Member
I have an old e machines crapola special with a whopping 512 mb of ram from 2006. It quit on me about two years ago and I forgot about it in a storage closet. This story ends with me finding it and playing with cables and settings until I figured out that one of the ram banks had burned out. It runs on the other bank now (it only has the one 512 card) and is doing fine now. Over the last few years I have wanted to get into computer building, but have had no real good learning experiences. This computers new life has given me a great and cheap idea. The parts are cheap enough. I know a little bit about swapping out new computer parts, but beyond parts replacing I barely know enough to try moving the ram card to a new slot to see if the old slot is bad or vice versa. I'm open to all ideas. My main goal is to get the computer (on one ram bank) to run circa 2006 video games. I do realize that this means I will have to buy a video card. I'm trying to keep the price low and am trying to avoid having to buy a more powerful power supply. I do realize that both of these may not be acheiveable, but id rather keep price low. Ill do what I have to. Any and all input would be greatly appreciated. I am very interested in learning how to do this sort of thing. If I could use this computer to practice on it would make it all the better. Thank you for reading all that, I look forward to what you all have to say. Thanks
 
Most likely just a bad stick of ram. Try the other stick in the other slot and see what happens.

Would need to know the model number and specs to see if this is even worth it.
 
The computer is an E machine W3115 with 512 mb of ram AMD Sempron 3100+ Processor and has a nivida video card built into the motherboard. The computer was largely unmodified and it was the actual ram slot that was bad. The board has two slots with one chip so i moved the chip to the unoccupied slot and it fired up again. Im not looking for a powerhouse build. I just want to use this thing to practice on. Thanks
 
If the slot is dead then you could upgrade to 1gb of memory buy getting a 1gb stick. Other than that and getting a video card and decent power supply, I would say its not worth putting money into this old system. You have a single core processor which isn't ideal.
 
Will the single slot run a 2 gig stick? I can buy cheapie parts. this is only a mess around deal. Im fairly sure this thing is ddr
 
That PC might be limited to two gigs of memory meaning one gig per slot. I have a K9 board with AM2-3800+ that won't see more than two gigs of memory.
 
StrangleHold said:
This leads me to believe both slots work. Yes, No?
Click to expand...

No, I had not touched the internals of this computer prior to its failure so i took the stock ram chip out of the slot that the manufacturer put it in and moved it to the adjacent slot. Prior to this switch the computer would try to run and fail miserably every time. I've got one good slot and that means a max of one gig of ram on this board. Its not gonna be a good computer, but I can learn from it.
 
As you've likely found out, for consumer based boards you're pretty limited to 1 GB/stick when using DDR1.

You could also update the BIOS to the latest version and look for a cheap CPU upgrade for that socket.

Does the board have PCIE or VGA? If you lucked out and have a PCI Express slot you can get something like a 5450 for cheap which will give you suitable performance in games for that era (like, $10 after rebate), yet fulfill your low power requirement too.

Do you have any other learning goals for this PC? You could do something like install a version of Linux which could acclimate you to the environment but also have your equipment feel a little more capable while requiring less RAM to operate.
 
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