Win 7 Pro vs XP Pro

[Bob Eager]

Neither had I until you mentioned it!

[John Rumm]

The general answer is that with synchronous memory devices, faster

*should* be ok. However in the real world you have designs that were never verified with the faster memory (probably did not exist at the time of design), and on rare occasions you might get problems.

Many motherboard makers publish tables of certified ram/motherboard combinations. Its often worth using them.

[John Rumm]

I think someone has already mentioned Prime95 - but its torture test will often reveal problems hiding in otherwise apparently working hardware.

[Ian Jackson]

Indeed they did (if it passes Memtest86).

The present situation is that after appearing to run fine, on boot-up the BIOS stopped detecting one or more drives. Googling for advice on this syndrome, the many answers are reveal that it could be almost anything (including there not being an R in the month).

Just in case, I took out the BIOS battery to check it, and it was over

3V (but I'll pop a new one in, just in case). I obviously had it out too long, as afterwards, the save BIOS settings had reverted (presumably) the defaults. All drives now seem to be being detected (so far). Just for luck, I did a 'Load optimised settings" (or whatever it's called), and it's still OK.

Other obvious problems could be intermittent dodgy PSU connections - or even a flaky PSU (which I'll be checking).

[dennis]

Modern chipsets read the memory speed from a chip on the dimm and set the correct speed, older ones didn't.

[John Rumm]

Indeed - although even then there can still be problems IME. Getting less frequent it has to be said though