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

[ME]

On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Ryan wrote:
> This morning I decided to tweak my bios settings, and spoted the SDRAM cycle 
> field. Wondering if it would make things faster I set it from 3 to 2, 
> rebooted, and wandered off to get some snacks. I came back to find some weird 
> errors, so I rebooted again. I got more errors this time, but diffrent ones. 
> I managed to get a console with the magic SysRq key, and mounted the rest of 
> my partitons. Many of my commands were borked. A few more reboots resulted in 
> diffrent errors each time.
> 
> Totaly confused, I pulled up a console on my firewall and got on IRC. After 
> trying a boot disk which gave me I kernel panic, I asked if anyone had any 
> idea what was wrong. Someone asked what I'd changed since it worked, then it 
> dawned on me, my RAM must not like the cycle length of 2. So i set it back, 
> and my system happily booted.
> 
> I was wondering, are these symptoms similar to what one experiances with 
> faulty RAM?

Yep. Seg faults, bus errors, programs terminatiing with wierd
(unexpeced) errors that do not make sense. Also, not so easy to repeat.

Errors similar to what happens when memory overheats, or bus speed is
exceeded too. Sometimes tricky to diagnose.

-ME

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