I recently flash my HP with a new Bios and now it gets to the XP screen and freezes up. I flashed it again just in case of some kind of error during the first flash, but still get the same result. I tried to reboot from the last known working config. but still get the same result. I did a system recovery and I still got the same result. My frustration level is high and would appreciate any help I can get. Thanks

hit F8 an start with boot logging, tell us where it stops.

Thanks for replying so quickly. This morning I made another bios update diskette and flashed it again. It took the upgrade this time...thank goodness. But now the memory I purchased wont work. The computer starts, but I only get a black screen. I have tried a combination of new and old memory and only the old memory is recognized. Is there a settiing for this or could both sticks be defective? I know this is off topic, but it never hurts to ask. Thanks.

Hi,
I know you may have alreay tried this however it is best prctice and recommended by gigabyte and other major manuf's that you go into your bios and "load optimized settings" after a bois flash. Once this is done i would also check the ram you have purchesed 1 stick at a time.

What speed ram did you buy?
Does your motherboard support tht speed?
Also what Voltage ram did you buy?
Does your board support that voltge?

I recently bought £200 woth of 1066DDR2 ram from OCZ (water cooled) only to findout that gigabyte have only allowed an increas to 0.3v in the bios and i require 0.4 for stable 1066 performance.

Therefore i had similar issues when my pc tried to boot at 1066mhz... until then i am currently running at the lower 800mhz awaiting revision 2 bios from GB.

Try that and let me know, the other thing you can try is booting to a live CD to see perhaps if your OS install has been corrupted during the last issues you had trying to post after a bad flash etc...

Keep us posted

Phreak

Without the right voltage or speed settings ram can be a very fussy little girl indeed.

Absolutely right! I was running my desktop XP Pro for a year after adding some RAM with no known issues and it started crashing with no notice and restarting. After some heavy duty troubleshooting without results, I checked the RAM. CHKDSK said no problem with memory. But when I went to system restore and did the memory cheks there...Ooops!

The manufacturer still swears these sticks are correct for this model computer but once I took them out, I've had no further problems at all. zeroth

It could also be the size, most laptops can't take bigger than 1gig sticks, and many can't handle more than 512mb (if it's a couple years old). Would you give us the specs on both your new and old memory modules?

Wow..thanks for all of the responses. The notebook is about 5-6 years old. Its a HP Pavilion ZE5300 P4 266 Mhz. The old memory was 256 pc2100 DDR. The new memory is the same but 512 instead of the 256. The notebook is supposed to handle up to 1G of memory. I will put in 2 sticks-one for each slot. The new and old chips are made by Hynix.