[vox-tech] Tweaking RAM settings can do weird things

[Ryan]

This morning I decided to tweak my bios settings, and spoted the SDRAM cy=
cle=20
field. Wondering if it would make things faster I set it from 3 to 2,=20
rebooted, and wandered off to get some snacks. I came back to find some w=
eird=20
errors, so I rebooted again. I got more errors this time, but diffrent on=
es.=20
I managed to get a console with the magic SysRq key, and mounted the rest=
 of=20
my partitons. Many of my commands were borked. A few more reboots resulte=
d in=20
diffrent errors each time.

Totaly confused, I pulled up a console on my firewall and got on IRC. Aft=
er=20
trying a boot disk which gave me I kernel panic, I asked if anyone had an=
y=20
idea what was wrong. Someone asked what I'd changed since it worked, then=
 it=20
dawned on me, my RAM must not like the cycle length of 2. So i set it bac=
k,=20
and my system happily booted.

I was wondering, are these symptoms similar to what one experiances with=20
faulty RAM?