AbalalaFabala

yes, i sure did destroy another stick of this space age shit. bad timing. pun intended… if you got that you are a geek.

right now i am testing all my ram with yet another genius little piece of freeware.

Memtest86+

it is not only free, but it is basically the standard ‘ram tester’ app. it can be run a variety of ways, including off of a bootable CD or USB drive. the way i use it is by simply burning the .iso onto a regular CD. then you can easily set your computer to boot off of its disc drive. makes it pretty easy to go through each stick of ram individually, testing between reboots.

technically, you want to let the test run for a long time. like, many many hours. but, in the ‘real world’ this thing is usually used when the ram is totally roasted, and if it is memtest will let you know pretty quick.







so im now crippled. i have a pile of extra ram layin around, but none to replace this stick. so it looks like i will be running a half a GB down with my matched pairs screwed up. oh.. the beats are not going to be happy about this…

edit:
one important tip about hardware failure: if you have a serious computer problem, and you have somehow managed to narrow it down to being a hardware issue, do not do ANYthing before you test each stick of your ram. ram goes bad a lot, and it is cheap. before you replace a motherboard/psu/hdd/os - test the ram!
twice i have nearly sprung for parts i didnt actually need, only because bad ram was making diagnosis pretty much impossible. even one little bit of bad ram is like lsd for a computer.
you know how youd expect a machine to always run on logic? like, even when it is having a colossal breakdown. this is not the case with ram… last time i had a bad stick, my computer did things that i would not have thought possible. it basically means that *every* single thing the pc is telling you could be right, wrong, changing from moment to moment, or… yellow, or… hazelnut. similar to the effect of the ‘probablity drive’ in hitchikers guide to the galaxy.

Tags: shiat