So, my computer was acting a little funny for a couple weeks. Froze maybe once, sometimes mouse would stop working, or keyboard, or was just slow.
Then one day on boot, my bios gave a memory error. Ugh. My machine is a dual e5-2670 machine with 16*4 gb of ECC memory. Was not looking forward to lots of troubleshooting. I suspect that ECC helped to keep the machine running as well as it did without just constant crashes. I bought 64 gigs partially with the expectation that if something failed, I could go back to 32 gigs and have lots of spare DIMMs. They were so cheap.
Thankfully (in a way), I quickly found the problem: my AIO water cooler leaked! The top DIMM under the cooler was greasy and wet, I found another drop about to fall from the cooler. I assume the leak has gotten worse over time, and perhaps only a few drops have fallen over the last couple weeks. All the DIMMs below the top one look fine (although the error did list the top two DIMMs).
Question is: how to clean? I used a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol to get the dimm clean. a few of the contacts look warn, but hopefully still okay. And I kinda doubt it was the liquid which would degade the gold contacts, but I'm not sure. But can I clean the MB slot for that DIMM? And how? Any extra precautions when I put things back together?
Then one day on boot, my bios gave a memory error. Ugh. My machine is a dual e5-2670 machine with 16*4 gb of ECC memory. Was not looking forward to lots of troubleshooting. I suspect that ECC helped to keep the machine running as well as it did without just constant crashes. I bought 64 gigs partially with the expectation that if something failed, I could go back to 32 gigs and have lots of spare DIMMs. They were so cheap.
Thankfully (in a way), I quickly found the problem: my AIO water cooler leaked! The top DIMM under the cooler was greasy and wet, I found another drop about to fall from the cooler. I assume the leak has gotten worse over time, and perhaps only a few drops have fallen over the last couple weeks. All the DIMMs below the top one look fine (although the error did list the top two DIMMs).
Question is: how to clean? I used a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol to get the dimm clean. a few of the contacts look warn, but hopefully still okay. And I kinda doubt it was the liquid which would degade the gold contacts, but I'm not sure. But can I clean the MB slot for that DIMM? And how? Any extra precautions when I put things back together?