Re: Alternatives to MemTest

geoff wrote:
I loaded the safe defaults in the BIOS and it passed all the memory tests. To be honest, I am not sure what the difference is between safe and optimized defaults. As far as I can tell, they appear the same (speed, timings, etc.).

One pass for all the tests took the same amount of time with the safe defaults, 52 minutes for 4 gigs.

If the error is repeatable then you definitely have bad ram.

If this is the case then as soon as some program data is written into
that area of ram, then it may get corrupted under certain conditions.

I guess it is a confidence issue. If errors were popping up throughout the tests then I would think there is an issue.

However, for the more paranoid, what you write cuts both ways, unless one is willing to re-certify their hardware every week or so, data from your finance app could be written out incorrectly because a byte went bad two days after it was tested, or data saved incorrectly because of a bad sector on the HDD, etc.

I doubt even the NSA re-certifies all their hardware each week. A bank I did some contracting for had a call center of about 10,000 people, all on one floor, and they did not certify the hardware each week/month/etc.

Given that, it would be quite possible for them to look at your checking account balance and find an extra zero there (or one zero less) because a stick of memory went bad (one byte on it) or a bad sector on the HDD.

--g


That is why "real" computers use ECC :-)

The mystery, is why it isn't more common on desktop platforms.

Paul
.

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