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Reliability of Computer Memory?
olddoc writes "In the days of 512MB systems, I remember reading about cosmic rays causing memory errors and how errors become more frequent with more RAM. Now, home PCs are stuffed with 6GB or 8GB and no one uses ECC memory in them. Recently I had consistent BSODs with Vista64 on a PC with 4GB; I tried memtest86 and it always failed within hours. Yet when I ran 64-bit Ubuntu at 100% load and using all memory, it ran fine for days. I have two questions: 1) Do people trust a memtest86 error to mean a bad memory module or motherboard or CPU? 2) When I check my email on my desktop 16GB PC next year, should I be running ECC memory?"
Recently I had consistent BSODs with Vista64 on a PC with 4GB...
This was a surprise?
wrap your _whole_ computer in tinfoil to deflect those pesky cosmic rays. it also works to keep them out of your head too.
I bet Windows will love you replacing the DIMM's while running.
Then it would proba%ly alter not just one byte, b%t a chain of them. The cha%n of modified bytes would be stru%g out, in a regular patter%. Now if only there were so%e way to read memory in%a chain of bytes, as if it w%re a string, to visu%lize the cosmic ray mod%fication. hmmm...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I bet Windows will love you replacing the DIMM's while running.
Yeah wait until it starts to sleep first, or even better if you catch it while hibernating
Anyone else have RAM modules degrade over time? I've never seen this.
I don't know if this is from degraded RAM, or rats pissing on the motherboard, but an olde IBM PC running DOS (upgraded to 3?) started having little blips on-screen and other strange characters appear in the output of programs and the shell itself, and in addition to this it would randomly lock up occasionally displaying a stack error.
I know the floppy is alright, because it boots fine without any of these symptoms occurring from other machines it boots from. The video cardish component appears fine to the naked eye, but does not explain the random stack errors and unexplained lockups. I've always wondered what the hell was wrong with this thing (and a certain someone won't stop nagging me to throw it away, already) but it could very well be degraded RAM. Can't boot up memtest86 because (CPU i386) but the symptoms seem to all point to bad RAM.
I've often had it pick up bad ram, usually within the first five minutes. One time, the memory in question had been through a number of unprotected power surges. The motherboard and power supply were dead too.
You can reliably replicate my results by removing the ram, snapping it in half and putting it back in. No need to wait for a power surge to see memtest86 shine.
Memtestx86 is bögus. My machine alwayS generated errors when I run the test but it works fOne otherwise ÿ
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
and having sex in the back of a red 1948 Buick convertible at a drive-in movie theater on Tuesday night, Feb. 29th under a blue moon... all at the same time....
Mom?
I usually wear medieval armour. Not only does that work as efficient as tinfoil, it's also very fashionable.
I remember when my Dad and I picked up our first bits at the store. We had a hatchback, so it was pretty easy to just slide them in sideways, but then we had to bungie-cord everything down so they wouldn't shift too much on the ride home. Darn kids today with their multi-gigabyte memory chips.
That's impressive. Most memory tester software so I've tried requires a working power supply and motherboard.
I see you've never experienced the joys of J2EE.
You must be unlucky or the cause.
This would make a great slogan for Microsoft's new ad campaign:
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It is in Microsoft's best interest to identify the few cases in which Windows is not the problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"