*sigh*

[kierthos]

Okay, something is still wrong with my computer.

It's not Blue-screening any more. Nope. Just crashing outright. Just shuts down.

I can restart it in safe mode, and then restart in normal mode from there and it works fine for hours, or even a day or more, but it does crash again... that's pretty much guaranteed.

I guess I have to run memtest again, see if it is the RAM. It's possible that the test I ran earlier only checked the first stick of RAM.

Comments

[thedeadcat]

Quicker than Memtest - have you tried moving the RAM to different slots?

[kierthos]

Nope. A few reasons for that.

One - I'm not a klutz when it comes to computer hardware, but I am skittish about messing with things.

Two - I think (not sure) that all the RAM slots are filled. (Four RAM sticks. Two are 1 GB, two are 512 MB)

Three - It typically takes several hours, if not a day or more, before the computer crashes, so it's not exactly a sharp turnaround to see if "RAM in new spot causes crashes".

Four - I'm about to go to work, so while your idea does have merit, I can't test it right now anyway. :)

[egearman]

If/when you get around to trying this, pop the two 512s out first. Let it run and see what happens. If you are lucky it's one of them that's bad. And ram is still fairly cheap so replacing it shouldn't be too bad.

If it still crashes, pop the 2 1GB sticks out and put in the 512s in their spot. And wait.

It's possibly, but very unlikely, that one of each is bad... trying to find out which it is could be a much more painful option. Might be best to just get new at that point.

[kierthos]

Well, I let memtest86 run for a while, and was actually able to make sense (sort of) of the errors it was throwing up. (Basically, after the first pass, there were no errors, but during the second pass, all hell became unshirted.)

Anyway, from my Ogg the Caveman method of reading the error messages ("Well, it says X, that's got to be this. It also says Y, which isn't addressable RAM, so I dunno."

To make a long story short (too late!), one of the 1 GB sticks appears to be bad. I pulled it, and let memtest86 chug away for a while, whilst I played some Rock Band 3. After remembering that I indeed suck at anything on drums on a higher then Medium difficulty, I was seeing no errors from memtest and rebooted.

So here we are now. Hoping. Hoping that the computer stays up, and that a visit to newegg will resolve my "I'm back down to 2 GB of RAM" sadness.

[thedeadcat]

Yeah, all RAM spots being filled means it'd be a shuffle test, so grok that. Pain in the ass. Though really, it's still preferable that it's your RAM and not your board. One's a pop-out/in install, the other is a full rebuild...

You still have 512 in your machine? Damn. o_0 I just tossed all our old 512 sticks into the e-recycle bin. (Granted, most of 'em were laptop sticks...)

[kierthos]

The computer is a few years old. And it came with 512s.

Dell, the cheap fucks that they can be, decided "Hey, this guy ordered 2 GBs of RAM on his computer. Instead of being nice, and giving him two 1 Gb sticks, let's give him one 1 GB, and 2 512s!"

And based on some further testing, it is one of the RAM sticks. One of the 1 GB ones.