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

[Richard Harke]

On Sunday 06 March 2005 13:55, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 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
I've had two instances of bad RAM in the last two years but both were right
out of the package and I was able to get them replaced. Don't overdo it with
memtest86. I found that if I ran it long enough, everything would start
to overheat and it would begin reporting errors. In particular, one set of
memory ran fine for about an hour, then started showing errors. But the 
temperature was near cut-off at all three sample points. I kept the memory
and I've had no problem for several months.
Richard Harke