CompuServe Messages

Dear Everybody, I apologise in advance if this message is ill-formatted and/or difficult to follow… I'm having to type it into winCIM (bleah)… why, you immediately ask? Good question, I'll tell you. Because my A3000 won't. I was noticing some short horizontal lines appearing on a piece of software a few days ago, reported to the author as a bug-fix, then realised I was also getting similar lines on my WorkBench. Suspecting a virus, I d/led what looked to be an effective virus hunter (certainly moreso than the ancient version of VirusX I was running), and it said all was cool. So, upon receiving advice that I might have a chip ram problem, I dissected the A3000. Upon opening the case, there was a dust storm straight out of Lawrence of Arabia. Grabbing a Dirt Devil, I proceeded to clean all of the dust out (as best I could), careful of the components, of course. I'd cleaned this machine out several months ago already, and it was dirtier this time than last. Locating the chip ram, I checked to make sure it was seated well. It was. I checked to see that my fast (zip) ram was seated well. All 8 1meg X 4 chips were seated well (one wiggled a smidgen when I touched it, the rest were rock solid). Reassembled, being careful of all of the cables inside, and tested. Booted okay, except I now have 900+k of chip ram, and no fast ram (originally, I had 2 and 2). Boot completed, leaving my UEdit text editor screen foremost, and I noticed tiny flickers on it, similar to the small lines I'd noticed before, only these disappeared. After everything settled down, I grabbed the mouse to switch to WorkBench, and, boy, what a really pretty display I got. It had conniptions. I figure the advice was right, that I have a chip ram problem. If so, can someone give me the specs I need for chip ram, so I don't go buying some ram that won't work or will make matters worse? Thanks in advance.