Weird thing keeps happening.

[Brian Bartley]

I'm having a strange thing happening.  It started with my HP XW4550 towers and how it's happening to my HP DC7900 towers and some of my Lenovo's as well.  I will either get a 5-5-5 beep pattern and then a red LED or just will not get any video at all.  If I shut down the machine pull all of the RAM and re-insert it one chip at a time, restart-acknowledge RAM change-boot to a Windows login screen- shut down-insert the next chip-repeat the same process the computer will come up and run fine.  Does not seem to happen to the same computer over & over just randomly in the labs.  Everyone of them has worked fine after this fix, it's just a pain in the butt to have to keep doing it.  Any ideas?

[Bryan Berg]

How old are those computers? Do you do the "eraser trick" on the RAM contacts before you reseat them to remove any built-up tarnishing? Over time, I've always had the understanding that the tarnishing on the gold contacts will start creating problems, but a pencil eraser will get rid of that tarnishing.

Just a wild hair idea....