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Mid 2010 Model A1278 / 2.4 or 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo processor

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I have no display and the system is beeping on beep every 5 sec

I upgrade my MacBook Pro 7,1 to 8GB (from the original 2GB).

Afterwards I upgraded the OS to El Capitan (ver 10.11.6). Everything was fine and I was very happy until the other day when I was FaceTiming and my system went whacky.

Screen froze with a bunch of horizontal Lines, and started beeping (one tone at 5sec intervals). I shut it down, and restarted. Now I have no display and the beeping still there.

Tried removing and reinstalling the memory sticks. Still no display and beeping. Eventually had to remove one 4GB stick and leave the other in.

I had to do Shift/Option/Command while pushing the power button thing.

It seems to be running good but only on 4GB. Would be nice if I could use the other 4GB stick too.

Please don’t suggest the EFI Boot ROM thing, as I have tried that and I get the “…won’t support…” message. Currently at EFI Boot ROM ver. MB71.003F.B0O, SMC ver. 1.60f6.

Any other suggestion for this non techie user would be welcome.

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It's a curious behavior as there are unrelated symptoms in place. Unsuitable RAM sticks don’t give the one tone every 5 seconds, that’s caused by no RAM installed. However what puzzles me most is that you need to bypass SMC with Shift/Option/Command while pushing the power button to boot into your Mac..was that a one off or that’s the only way you can boot your Mac ? Because if that’s the case there might be just a concidence. Please add the RAM sticks specs too, did you buy the PC3-8500 ?

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It’s possible one of the RAM sticks that you got went bad. Typically, computers will beep when something like RAM is not working. As a troubleshooting step, if it were me, I would put only one RAM stick in at a time and see if you can get the system to turn on. If it works with one stick and not the other then it’s likely a bad stick.

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