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Are Bad RAM Chips Common?
A semi-Anonymous Coward asks: "I recently built myself a new system using a mainboard which required using registered DDR SDRAM -- the motherboard will not work with unbuffered / unregistered memory, and I wanted the extra integrity provided by registered memory anyway. To my amazement, both the memory I purchased with the board and one of two other sticks I purchased were either defective or simply incapable of working with the board (which is the Chaintech 7KDD, BTW). About how often do people run into defective memory, and do they see them from the 'reputable' manufacturers as often as they do the 'no-name' ones? Now that I've spent a ridiculous amount of money on this, I'm a lot more wary."
Why does the computer industry tolerate this sort of thing? When it was hobbyists tinkering with Northstars and Cromemcos and Sols it might have been understandable, but we should have grown up a long time ago.
When you put oil into your car, you know that the oil companies and the car companies have gotten together with the American Petroleum Institute to set standards so that as long as your owner's manual says "API SG" and the oil you buy says "API SG" or better, that oil will work in your car. And you can use Mobil Oil to top up an engine filled with Quaker State without losing any sleep over whether their chemistry is compatible.
You don't rely on friends' stories of whether Quaker State is better than Shell Oil. You know that regardless of the price of the oil, if it says API SG it meets API SG specs and if your car says API SG specs are good enough, they're good enough.
It doesn't benefit anyone if your engine seizes up, and it doesn't benefit anyone if your computer crashes.
It's simple, it's easy, millions of consumers who aren't chemical engineers buy engine oil every day without wrecking their cars.
Why is it expecting too much for computer vendors to do the same?
And, while we're at it, why don't all computers use parity-checked memory? This was standard on 100% of all computers before the micro age, and for some reason people started putting in non-parity memory to save money and asserting that "it works."
And our computers crash a lot, and nobody knows why and nobody does anything about it and everyone just accepts that that's the way computers are...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
At no point did you say that you've verified that your motherboard is good. If you keep swapping out RAM and all of it seems to be bad, I've got news for you: it's not the RAM that's bad.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You've been lucky on RAM for sure. Now about this static discharge thing. I also never used to use wriststraps or any other static precaution working on home stuff. I always did it right at work because it was required, but at home I routinely did just about anything I could to static damage them because I knew it was unlikely to cause a problem. My experience was always that the components worked fine anyways, and that ESD damage must be such a low occurence that you're just not likely to ever see it so it's not worth the trouble.
However, later on down the line I learned the error of my ways. I was failing to understand the nature of ESD damage. Someone finally clued me in. In short, ESD damage *does* happen with a surprisingly high frequency when you handle components unsafely, but you don't notice because the damage takes time to show. Essentially the high voltage of the ESD (ESD like when you shock yourself on a doorknob is very high voltage, it's just very low current) is destructive to the transistor junctions, but it usually doesn't cause immediate complete failure. A few days, months, or even years down the road, the junction will prematurely break down, having had a shortened lifespan because of the ESD damage.
So those components that failed on you after a few good years of service that you chalked up to just failing from age probably failed to a large degree from ESD back when you first installed them, and had you used the right precautions, they might've lasted a lot longer. Now that I understand this, I'm a lot more careful about ESD even at home. From what I read, the long-term effects of ESD over a large sample are better felt by electronics companies. They can actually see the warranty return rate on their chips drop consistently when they put better ESD precautions into place, although it may take a few years to see.
11*43+456^2