Vostro 200 PCI-E bug

My PC at work died the other day and while scrounging together hardware to keep me running until we order new i5 based PCs for the techs I had the joy of fighting the elusive heisenbug of the Vostro 200.

Long story short: if you have issues with a PCI-E card like video cutting out randomly and never returning it’s because the designers were on meth. The solution is to only have RAM in DIMM slots 3 and 4. If you put anything in 1 or 2 you’ll want to commit suicide.

What the hell, Dell. This is why I build my PCs.