VERY FILTHY memory, how to physically clean?

ozziesironman

New Member
I just rediscovered this forum, as my windows computer crashed and i lost my stuff. grr. found out brother was watching and downloading porn, and a virus took everything down. never did build that gaming computer i was wanting to... :(

new question. i bought my friends' cousins' old Powermac G5 2GHz dual core for 30 bucks, not a bad deal. but the computer was in a home where they smoke. heavily. plus it was in downtown san diego, about 4 blocks from the beach. so, as you can imagine, the interior was DISGUSTING. i cleaned it up, took the heat sink off video card cleaned it with rubbing alcohol and reapplied arctic silver. still runs super hot (59-61c at idle.. geforce 6600LE passive cooled)
but I did NOT clean the memory. its still caked in the byproduct of dust, cigarette smoke, and salt combination. how would I go about cleaning that gunk off the memory? same as the video card?

oh, and one more thing. it takes DDR2 533mhz memory, and I put an extra 4GB (2x4GB) patriot extreme memory in it which is 800MHz. seems to work fine, however I did notice that if i take the patriot memory OUT, the system seems a tad more responsive. am i hurting anything by running 800MHz memory in a 533MHz slot, or is the memory just underclocking itself? i DID notice that the memory controller runs high... say maybe 57c.
 
Alcohol and a Toothbrush. Just make sure they are completly dry before putting them back in.

As far as the size and amount of memory, would really need to know what motherboard it is. Have you tried the Patriot by itself, without the old memory? If its running a Windows 32bit OS, it cant see over 4gb. anyway.
 
Last edited:
will do with the toothbrush. thanks.
and its running mac os x 10.5.8. (its a powerPC model, not an intel model. windows is only available in virtual pc 7, where it runs "decent". it will run FLStudio 7, but its very maddening.) not sure of the logic board number...
 
tried the patriot by itself while the stock memory dried. its somehow running better without the old ram in it. so i left the ram out. will running the 800MHz ram hurt it, or is the ram just underclocking itself to comply with the memory controllers 533MHz or so?
 
It will clock down to whatever the memory controller tells it to. You won't hurt anything by using the RAM.
 
Back
Top