Dodgy memory - should I replace?

Have an old Microstar laptop, Celeron 2200MHz processor. It came with
128Mb RAM, and one free SO-DIMM 333Mhz slot. For the last 3 years this
slot has had 512Mb memory in it.

There's been a long-standing problem with the battery (suspect battery
charging circuit) that they said they'd fixed under warranty (ie they
replaced the battery...) but re-occured again out of warranty. Since
mobility wasn't a huge issue, we've just run it off the mains. However
recently a connector in the transformer has come loose, and now if you
kick the transformer the power can die instantly...

Sometime after this started happening the machine (sometimes) wouldn't
boot. Then it would never boot... Ran memtest86 from Ubuntu boot disk
and found screeds of memory problems. I presumed memory had been
damaged by sudden losses of power...

Removed the additional 512Mb module, memory problems appear to go away
- machine boots (slowly!), memtest86 works, etc.

Replaced the 512Mb module, everything still seems to work - memtest86
has "passed" the memory 3 times over a period of more than an hour...

Could I have advice on if/when to replace the RAM, and whether I can
be sure the problem was with the additional 512Mb, or whether I need
to be worried about the original 128Mb which is somewhere inside the
guts of the machine and very inaccessible!!

Cheers

Colin

--

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Colin Brough Colin.Brough@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Replace .invalid with .co.uk to reply)
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Relevant Pages

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