I've never seen this before either, but it sounds like a security feature.
I never heard of this either. To be honest I might have expected it from a prebuilt but not one which I assembled myself?
I did build this pc in a hurry, I had just done 3 in a row, assembled my own, a gaming system for my brother, and then this one. I remember checking the motherboard manual only to make sure that I got those tiny cables at the bottom of the motherboard (front panel wiring for power-on etc etc) correct on the first try.
The system worked immediately, I installed Windows, drivers and all was fine.
Have you tried running the new stick on its own?
Not yet.
I had wanted to upgrade the RAM for quite some time, so I had purchased 4 x 4GB Geil Black Dragon RAM, put 3 of them to replace my personal gaming system (it's triple channel) and planned to use the other 4GB to pair it up with the 4GB (value Corsair or whatever it had been) that I had put in this work server 4 years ago.
I had been getting low memory warnings ever since we upgraded to Win 10. Then during the past months it started to occasionally crash some time after the low memory warning.
This morning right before I started this thread, it had just crashed and I thought that it was the right time to quickly pop in the new 4GB stick and hopefully solve the problem once and for all. Since it would take that couple of minutes to reboot I might as well shut it down and insert the RAM instead.
But unfortunately things went strange.
Also, since this PC is so critical to your business, I think you should consider a second one in a failover configuration. Might cost you a bit of money, but how much could extended downtime cost you?
Though that sounds great it's not practical for us. Downtime wouldn't cost much since we can keep manual records temporarily but it's extremely inconvenient.
We have software installed which takes care of all the running of the company, from invoicing, stocks, payments to employee wages and commissions.
We pay yearly for the licence and for tech support, but the latter is only limited to support concerning direct failure of our accounting program.
To avoid piracy, one of the conditions is that our accounting program must always be installed by them. And unless it's an obvious problem with the software itself, we'd have to fork out like €250 for each installation.
Obviously they are bound to come within minutes to keep us working, even when the problem is not a software one but then we'd get charged.
So it's not worth having a spare pc just in case because if anything happens they'll come over and we'd be charged just the same, spare pc or not.
So I cannot just play around and experiment with this computer - like I cannot do a Win 10 refresh just in case to see if the RAM will work, because that'd mean a bill of €250. I cannot risk anything which might stop the accounting software from working, because every time that happens we'd be slapped with a €250 bill or perhaps less if the problem doesn't need a reinstallation, but still.
For example sometimes the software doesn't start because the computer doesn't start a particular service if we click on the program very quickly just after it loaded, but I know how to go into services and force it to start. Hadn't I figured it out I'd have to call them whenever it happens and get billed for it.
Seems like it is crashing at the VGA BIOS initialization. This usually pops up so fast you might not have ever seen it before, or it came up before the LCD monitor even wakes from sleep.
The new stick is either defective and unstable, or the RAM settings in the BIOS aren't compatible with the new stick of memory. I'd suggest booting with just the old stick, and going into the BIOS and changing anything RAM related back to auto.
Everything in the bios has always been on auto/default.