Bad RAM

The offensive RAM unit that was ruining my life!

This is a fairly long winded post but the point I really want to make is: if you ever have a problem with your computer, check your RAM! Seems obvious to some but it's often overlooked in favor of other possible problems. You never know what you might find after checking it and removing a dead RAM module will do wonders!

I recently had an issue with a bad RAM module in my main computer. It manifested itself one night while I was playing Half-Life 2. During the game I suddenly got a System Stop-Error screen (Blue Screen Of Death). I thought nothing of it and attempted to restart the machine. During the boot process the machine restarted itself again. This happened each time during the boot process. I did all the usual things: attempted to boot into safe-mode (same problem), use last good configuration (same problem)... I eventually set about "repairing Windows" which consisted of "refreshing" the existing installation of Windows on my machine with the Windows CD-Rom. That didn't work either, the process got only so far before hanging.

The stop-errors were different each time the blue screen popped up. One of the screens mentioned an IRQ problem and another something about a page being out of bounds. At that stage I suspected it might have a RAM issue causing the problem so I opened up my computer and swapped all the RAM modules around to see if that helped, and it did! After that I managed to boot into Windows and everything seemed to be fine, for a while. Then, another blue screen. The next time I managed to get back into Windows I Google'd RAM Checkers and came across this Microsoft Utility. And this brings us to the nub of this post:

Windows Memory Diagnostic tool is awesome! With it you make a little cd-rom boot disc, pop it into your disc drive before restarting the machine and it boots into a little DOS diagnostic thingy which does some wonderful little tests and stuff. Testing 3 gigs of RAM proved to take forever though so I simple loaded it up with one stick of RAM installed at a time, and by doing that I discovered that a 512MB RAM module that originally came with the machine failed every test while the other passed with flying colours. So I popped the good ones back in and restarted the computer.

And my machine works better now than it ever did! I always had little weird niggling problems; odd slow downs and failed start-ups. All gone! Even boot times are much faster now! The oddest thing of all though, my system hard-drive is much much quieter after I removed the RAM. I don't just mean less disk activity, it actually is quieter! From day I got the computer the hard drive used to be so loud that I had to put on music to cover up the crunching noises.

So there you have it! Two things I recommend you regularly check: Your bumps for lumps, and your RAM for flam.