[vox-tech] When RAM goes bad...

[Peter Jay Salzman]

I suspect one of my machines has bad RAM.

Out of the blue, Unreal Tournament occaisionally segfaults.

Then Nero is no longer capable of verifying burned DVDs in Windows.  When I
boot into Linux, the burned files on DVD and resident files on the hard
drive have the same md5sum, so Nero's verification is faulty.  The burn
looks good.  Verification is ill.

Played some Quake3 while KDE libs were downloading, and it just segfaulted.
It never did that before.  In fact, none of these things ever happened
before.

Everything on both OS's points to bad RAM.  The RAM is only 2 or 3 years
old.  Is it unheard of for RAM to die that quickly?

I've never run memtest86 before, but I got it running right now.  Aptitude
got it, made a boot floppy and it's running.  Looks like it may take awhile.

I've never come across this piece of bad luck before.  Any other tools to
look at?  I only knew of memtest86 from this mailing list.

Any other words of wisdom?  Except for the odd hard drive, all my machines
outlived their usefulness rather than components dying before their time.
This is a new one on me.

At this point, I'm *hoping* memtest86 tell me to replace a DIMM because
otherwise, I'm at a complete loss.

Pete

-- 
Save Star Trek Enterprise from extinction: http://www.saveenterprise.com

GPG Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E  70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D