computer woes (tl;dr never ever use openrgb with DDR5 RAM, it will kill your RAM)
this is not the biggest nightmare i have had recently (my friend is currently trapped in a psych hospital, that kinda overshadows everything but I can't really talk about it on here) but over the weekend my computer completely broke down, like 'wouldn't even POST' broke down.
the culprit seems to have been an incredibly bad piece of software called OpenRGB, which purports to be a cross-manufacturer system for managing RGB lights that works under Linux, but unfortunately has a horrific habit of writing bad data to the SPD EEPROM on DDR5 RAM, completely corrupting them. you can read more about that here.
if those acronyms (SPD EEPROM) don't mean anything to you, they also didn't to me before this weekend. naively, I simply opened this RGB control program to take a look at its features, didn't so much as change any lighting settings, and the result was that it basically bricked my RAM... and I only found out the next day when I booted the computer.
basically RAM sticks contain an additional bit of persistent memory, which stores information about the module such as timings and the like. if you want to change the LED colours, it seems that you also do so by writing data to this EEPROM. but if you write the data to the wrong place, or the wrong sort of data, it will make it so the motherboard can't even start up the RAM stick, so the computer has no memory and can't start.
to solve this, I borrowed a friend's spare DDR5 stick and put it one of the slots, and one of the corrupted sticks in the other (after verifying that the computer would boot with alternative RAM). it still wouldn't boot until I disabled a BIOS setting which saved the settings resulting from 'RAM training' instead of repeating the training on every boot. of course, I couldn't even get to BIOS without a working RAM stick.
once I had it booting, I could boot up Windows and, since I happened to be using Corsair RAM, use their iCue software to force a firmware update on the RAM stick, which would overwrite whatever garbage had been put in the SPD by OpenRGB. after doing this with both sticks, I took the spare stick out and ensured the PC would boot.
with this done, I booted Linux, switched to a different non-gui virtual terminal instead of logging in normally just in case openrgb was set to open on startup, and uninstalled the offending program. then I could log in to a normal session, reboot a few times to make sure it was in fact definitely working, turn the fast startup option back on in BIOS, and breathed a sigh of relief that everything seemed to be back up to normal functioning...
plan B had been 'buy another identical set of RAM sticks at inflated prices and copy the SPD off them, then try to get them refunded' so I'm really glad that didn't turn out to be necessary.
i doubt this post will reach very many people - after all, I did not have the sense to check around for reported problems before installing and running this very mainstream and legit looking software from my distro's package repo, I doubt one tumblr post will help very much - but hey, a small computer repair achievement, that's something innit
