I am running a Dell Dimension 8300 that has served me well for years. It was running yesterday with a pretty heavy load – Task Manager was showing the CPU memory usage as between 50 and 100 %. This level of load has happened many times in the past, and the response was just to slow down. But yesterday, it froze up. Nothing worked! So I turned it off by pressing the power button for 5 seconds.
Diagnostic lights A, B, C, D were yellow-yellow-green-green, respectively. According to the user’s manual, this pattern of diagnostic lights indicated a memory problem. I performed the suggested trouble-shooting, and I determined that the pair of memory modules (2 x 512 MB hynix) in DIMM 2 seemed to be fine, and the computer would run well with just that pair. But the other pair (2 x 1024 Corsair) was faulty – the computer would not boot with just those two. So I removed the bad pair, replaced the good pair, and verified that the computer still operated normally. This morning I purchased four new memory modules (4 x 1024 MB Patriot) to replace the bad modules and also increase the total RAM from 3 GB to 4 GB. I removed all of the older modules and installed the new modules. The computer seemed fine.
When I returned to heavy use – doing some video work, downloading off the internet, several web pages running simultaneously – everything seemed ok until I tried to play a video on my DivX player. Once again, Task Manger showed heavy memory usage. The video player never seemed to turn on, and pretty soon the system froze up again, like it did last night. This time the diagnostic lights formed a different pattern: green, yellow, green, green. I could not find this pattern in my user’s manual, so I thought it was time to get some help from the Dell Forum. Does anyone know what this diagnostic code means?
When I restarted the computer, I noticed that Internet Explorer, by itself, raised the CPU memory usage up to 280,000 kB. This is when I was just sitting at my home page. This behavior is very unusual.
The earlier memory modules were hynix 512 MB SDRAM, and Corsair PC3200 1024 MB SDRAM. The new memory modules are Patriot PC3200.
Any suggestions on how to address this problem?
Thank you,
laserguy
Dell Dimension 8300
Windows XP Home, SP3
Intel Pentium 4 CPU, 3.0 GHz with HT technology
4 GB SDRAM
500 GB primary internal hard drive, Seagate
250 GB internal hard drive, Seagate
500 GB external hard drive, Seagate, quantity = 2
Samsung optical drive
NVIDIA GeForce4 FX 5200 graphics card
SoundBlaster Live! sound card