Last night I accidentally hit the side of my computer case with my foot. This locked up my PC. After that it would not power on.

Hitting the power button would spin up the cpu fan for less than 2 seconds, then it would shut off, and do this in a loop, without any further input from me, endlessly.

I reseated both 8 GB sticks of ram, issue persisted. Took out one of the sticks and it runs just fine.

Should I just write off the second stick of ram at this point ? Could the issue be with the ram slot ? How dangerous is it to investigate further?

 

You know what to do.

 

Run Memtest86+ with one stick, testing each slot, then test with the other stick in each slot. If the memory or the slot is problematic you'll get results almost instantly. That'll give you a quick diagnosis of what's wrong.

If it's the slot, just run have the memory in other slots (if you have any extra).
If it's the memory, you can RMA it as most memory have lifetime warranties. If you don't want to do that, write it off and either use the computer with less memory or buy some more.

 

I was away for a few days, left the ram sitting on my desk. Came home, popped it in, ran without a hitch. I wonder what was going on that caused the issue in the first place.

It looks like the issue was with the ram.

 

You should still test it with memtest even if it appears to be running fine now. I had a similar problem in December where my PC would randomly run just fine, but then have the issues with starting again that you described. As you can see from that, only because it works now doesn't mean that the error necessarily needs to be gone, so I'd avice you to test with memtest.

 

Sacro is right. But, chances are, it could just be that when you hit it, you shook the case hard enough to screw with how the memstick was seated.