On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:06, you wrote: > > It would be worth running memtest86 overnight (or other suitably long > > period). That would remove suspicion from RAM and CPU. > > Memtest would only be testing a very minor part of the CPU, and that's > only a side-effect. It's not a CPU tester.
That's as may be, however, I had an ill machine that was getting slowly more ill. The obvious symptoms were hard drive corruption. I ran memtest86 as part of my general troubleshooting and it showed many RAM errors. I swapped the order of the RAM modules, but the errors showed in the same place. I replaced the RAM with a different set- same problem. This lead me to suspect CPU or motherboard, and replacing the CPU was an easy step to take. Voila! Problem solved. (which reminds me- I put that disk away somewhere because it probably wasn't bad after all. I could re-format and use it for something.) A
