I bought a new laptop and wanted to upgrade the memory. The guy at microcenter who sold me the laptop gave me a 512MB memory stick. The computer recognizes the memory and everything. Now after installing it, the computer keeps restarting by itself randomly. Im not sure if this is the problem or a coincidence because when windows turns back on and it reports that its a device driver error. So my question is, does the type of ram installed mess this up or something? Like incompatible RAM?
Yeah, it's very possible that it's an issue with the new memory. Do the event logs tell you anything? Have you tried starting up in safe mode and seeing if the machine still reboots itself?
Faulty RAM does exhibit those symptons. If it was incompatable, Windows would not run at all. You could try running the original RAM for a couple hours and see if your laptop reboots. If nothing's wrong, then I'd exchange the new RAM.