Memory cards and mouse freezing issues

[osomarron]

My pc has a 256MB 266Mhz DDR memory card and I bought a 256MB 333MHz DDR memory like a month ago. I had my doubts about mixing 266MHz and 333MHz cards but the vendor told me they would work fine on my intel D845BG.

Everything worked fine for like 2 weeks and then my mouse started to suddenly freeze (no way to bring it back but by rebooting). This issue happened like twice a day, and one day it started to happen like every five minutes (and some keys on my keyboard got frozen as well). At that moment I decided to test it on my unused Fedora partition and the peripherals didn't fail for the 2 hours I tested them. Then, I erased and reinstall the primary partition OS (btw, I use WinXP pro). It seemed to do the trick, but for a week only, then it started again...

I have already scanned all my drives with the latest updates from mcafee and have my firewall always up... I even went back to the basic mouse drivers but still... The only suspect I can think of is the memory MHz mix... Is it really ok for those 2 cards to work together or is the mainboard somehow going out of sync or something because of that...

 

[Freestone]

http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d845bg/sb/CS-013126.htm#2

indicates "200/266 MHz DDR SDRAM DIMMs only", so in theory you are exceeding manufacturer's specifications. I'm unsure how memory timings would be configured if both DIMMs have SPD (Serial Presence Detect).

You can always try running with just one DIMM installed, and alternate which one is installed. If the problem persists after trying both sticks alone, then the problem lies elsewhere. If the problem disappears when the 266MHz stick is installed, and reappears with only the 333MHz installed, then you have your answer.

Though not conclusive in itself if they run clean, you can try running memory tests. Both of these memory testers will create bootable diskettes that automatically start their respective memory tests upon boot:

Memtest86 - A Stand-alone Memory Diagnostic
Windows Memory Diagnostic