[vox-tech] Persistant hardware problem kicking my butt

[Shwaine]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Karsten M. Self wrote:

> If you have the option of testing RAM/DVDR on another system, do it.  If
> they're cle
>

Also, double-check the settings for the RAM in BIOS. I had a package of 
Corsair TwinX RAM that were highly unstable at their default settings. I 
did manage to tweak the BIOS settings to something stable on the first 
system they were installed in. Of course, can't find that sheet of notes 
with the stable settings now, so since I've moved them to a new system, 
I've had intermittent segfaults. Memtest86 actually runs for hours without 
error on the new system (had many errors at default settings on the old 
system), which makes it that much more of a pain to remember exactly how I 
tweaked the settings. Lesson learned from this: organize my notes better, 
heh. Second lesson is that memtest86 does not show all memory errors, 
particularly those rare bit flips and such. So don't take clean output 
from memtest86 as an indication the RAM and its associated buses and so on 
are okay.

As Karsten said, test the RAM in another machine and see if you can 
replicate some of the problems. Like I know my problem is the RAM because 
it's had the same issues on two different systems now. Or if you don't 
have another system available, find someone who does has the same sort of 
RAM and do a RAM swap. I did that several years back when I had another 
set of bad RAM. Swapped with my dad's machine and then my machine was 
stable and his was crashing.