Back when I built my desktop I opted for a tiny little thing instead of a giant tower which meant a microatx motherboard that only had two slots for memory. And memory was expensive at the time so I cheaped out and bought two 4GB sticks expecting to upgrade down the line and just jump to two 16GB sticks, which I eventually did.
This meant having those old sticks just lying around.
Geight meanwhile bought a big boy computer with like 20 thousand empty drive bays, and today he was cleaning his case and the plan was to add those two sticks because: it's free random access memory.
But god it did not want to cooperate, and his computer just refuses to have all four slots occupied for reasons that are beyond me, with nothing displayed. His memory was blue, mine was red and we tried an absurd number of combinations trying to figure out what was busted, and it just seems like it's "having all four slots occupied".
Blue? ✅
Blue Red? ✅
Blue Red Blue? ✅
Blue Red Blue Red? ❌
Red? ✅
Red Blank Red? ✅
Red Blue Red? ✅
Red Blue Red Blue? ❌
Red Blue Blank Blue? ✅
So like, it's not a bad 4th slot, and it's not a bad stick. We eventually just gave up and now have one of those red sticks in his case and one lying around probably forever.
What was supposed to be a teaching moment about how computers are logical and predictable instead became a reinforcement of my worldview which is that computers should be handled like 40K dreadnoughts, you stuff it full of the best stuff you've got and weld it shut until it falls in battle.
