Stuart Henderson wrote:
On 2006/06/06 13:11, Sam Chill wrote:
There is a very handy program called memtest86 which can test your
memory to see if it is bad.
It tells you if it's bad, but it doesn't tell you if it's good.
Of course not. It doesn't even tell you if your memory is bad. It merely
tells you if there is a problem reading and writing test patterns to
memory. An error detected by memtest86 could just as easily indicate a
CPU, mainboard, or power supply problem. And there simply is no
reasonable method in existence which can tell you if your memory is
good. If there was, no bad memory would ever leave the factory. There
are merely degrees of quality.
This doesn't diminish memtest86's usefulness as a tool for avoiding a
part by part elimination rebuild.
As a former owner of two different custom PC shops, I would like to
point out that memtest86 successfully located memory reads or writes as
the problem on virtually all trouble PCs out of thousands of builds that
I have performed over the years (most of the rest were hard drive
errors, a few were related to faulty optical drives). The only systems
which had memory problems that were not detected by memtest86 were
systems in which low grade parts were used for the build. If you use
second or third tier manufacturers for your mainboard, memory, and power
supply then you deserve your memory errors as far as I'm concerned.
Stick with parts that are high quality, follow the RAM compatibility
list for you mainboard, and you will likely never experience any memory
errors. And if you do, there is a very good chance that memtest86 will
catch them. If you still fall into the minuscule percentage of memory
errors that slip through these actions, then you will likely have to
part out and test the machine piece by piece. Out of three thousand or
so computer builds, I can count the number of machines that fall into
this category on one hand.
Also, be sure to run memtest86 for at least a 12 hour period. I have
seen machines which do not necessarily spit out a memory error on every
pass of memtest86.
If memtest86 passes without error for twelve hours, then download and
run the hard drive diagnostic software provided by the manufacturer.
After that, get ready for several stimulating hours of part by part
elimination by exchanging each suspect part for another of similar type
(not the same type) of equal or greater quality than the suspect part.
After each part exchange you will have to reinstall the OS to ensure
that you are not experiencing errors which were introduced into the OS
during the last install. You will find the problem via this route.
FUN!!
Breeno
