Told a friend I could upgrade his ram in his laptop, (he only had 256, jumped him up to 2gb), I installed the ram and everything went well. Computer was running much faster. Then the screen froze and the computer would not respond at all. I hard booted and now I have a black screen. It almost seems as though the computer is not even running when I hit the power button. I tried putting the old ram back in and it still does the same thing.


Trouble is, he needs to take it with him when he goes to college on friday

Any help? Please tell me I didn't fry something. (I have ESD straps I use and an ESD mat, so I know it wasn't static related).


The laptop is a HP Pavillion dv2000. Vista OS

maybe the battery. this is one of those hardware problems that's nearly impossible to sort out with no symptoms available.

tried with external power?

Tried both, even tried without the ram installed, nothing. Talked to a computer engineer from work and he says it sounds like its dead. I was really hoping against this, because how can I say if this was my fault or not? I've put ram in computers dozens of times and never had a problem.

as long as the memory slots aren't fried there's nothing more to say than it was time for that machine to die. i don't envy your position and do hope your friend is understanding. good luck man.

Try resetting the BIOS back to default; there will be a jumper on the mainboard near the battery, or just pull the battery out and let it set for 20", snap it back in and see if it will boot. The BIOS batter is a small, nickle-sized silver batter mounted directly on the mainboard. Easy to spot. This is a longshot, but if the BIOS settings got corrupted bad enough that may prevent the computer from booting. Try to discern if the fans spin up. Does the DVD tray eject and load? If the unit is totally dead and NO electric getting in, the mainboard is probably dead and just swapping memory, or even installing the wrong memory will not do that. Like Surfer said, its number just happened to come up at the worst time (Murphys Law).

Luckily it was nothing I did, I explained what happened to him today and he said its happened to him, he would either keep powering off and on until it came up or just let it sit for a few days and try again. He said its been happening for awhile now. Big relief off my chest.

Check your power supply, it may be dying on him.

or the power switch