First post, by cde
After perhaps too many inserts and removal of DDR2 sticks on the motherboard (MSI K9VGM-V), the system wouldn't boot with a stick inserted into DIMM1 (long beep just after booting). It would boot with a stick in DIMM2, in single channel mode.
Visual inspection revealed that one of the tiny metal parts , third from the left and on the bottom, had broken and no longer provided electrical contact.
At first I thought it was hopeless and used the board in single channel mode (which in most normal use cases is only 10% slower than dual channel mode: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1598/3). However I thought of a solution to reestablish physical contact: by soldering a wire from the back of the motherboard to the DDR2 stick itself.
So first I identified, using the functional DIMM2 and a multimeter in continuity mode, the exact pin on the back of the board that corresponds to the broken pin. Then I soldered an AWG28 wire to the corresponding pin on DIMM1:
After that, the wire was soldered to the corresponding pin on the memory stick:
After putting the motherboard back into the case:
The board booted fine, but unfortunately screwing back that screw was a bad idea. I smelled some smoke, and the wire had burned and slit in half. I suppose the screw created a short with ground and thus caused the wire to burn:
