Acer Aspire E5-575-33BM - Will Not Work After Upgrading To 32GB RAM w/Crucial CT16G4SFD824A 32GB kit
Hello my fearless Acer community!
Finally after a few years of owning a becomingly slower and slower Acer Aspire E5 laptop, decided to liven it up a bit with SSD and 32GB of RAM over the original HDD and a pathetic 4GB of RAM. The Western Digital SSD 1TB gave it a HUGE boost in speed and boot/loading times. Can't say the same ease of upgrade when it came to RAM.
Here's my interesting story:
Followed countless recommendations on this site and elsewhere. Went with the highly recommended from Crucial site itself, 32GB RAM kit (comes with 16GBx2 sticks) and bought from Newegg. First try around, it worked with 2 sticks installed for a few power cycles. Afterwards, no-go. ONLY worked with a single 16GB stick in the original location of the OEM 4GB stick. Anytime I would try and run both banks of RAM, it would have the blank, black screen of nothing happening for hours on end. Once in a while it would flash the keyboard lights on/off endlessly as well.
Once again: only worked (and now working, as I'm typing this here) on one 16GB stick. I tried everything recommended from discharging static, to disconnecting battery, CMOS/BIOS battery removal/reset, BIOS firmware upgrades, etc. Downloaded memory test programs recommended here and used memtest86 to test each RAM stick individually, and they all passed flawlessly. It was only one 12 hour test cycle on memtest86 that worked when 2x16GB sticks were installed (32GB total) once. After I shut the laptop down, it was never to boot up again on 32GB RAM.
Even went as far as sending the presumably faulty RAM sticks (the part numbers are in the title of this post) back to the seller and having them send me new ones.
Guess what? Same exact issue, unfortunately.
Sadly, I am starting to think and see more clearly that it seems to be a motherboard/ram slot/hardware issue that is causing this unfortunate issue. And of course, my warranty is way past since I bought this back in 2017/18.
Just simply looking for some advice from the broader community before I start trying to change/troubleshoot the motherboard. I have experience with micro-electronics and PCB repair, so the next logical step was to search for schematics (maybe someone here knows the exact location/model to look for from previous experience) and start testing the obvious stuff - grounds, VREF signals and things of that nature.
It is unfortunate that it can't be as simple as plug and play. But then again, I somehow find this pretty fun and challenging to troubleshoot problems. Weird, I know :-)
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance to all.
-Dan K.-
