Is my memory failing?

[Carth]

I keep getting a BSOD about MEMORY MANAGEMENT. At any moment I could get a blue screen for a few seconds and my computer will restart.

So I ran memtest86+ and sure enough I got a lot of errors (in a few minutes it went up to hundreds):

I realise now that I should have sorted this out when I first built the computer, as it had the same memory-related BSOD even then, but it was rarer so I ignored it. In fact, rather strangely, it would be OK for a period of months so long as I left the computer running. If I turned the computer off or restarted it, then it was liable to get the BSOD and keep restarting for a while until it became stable. I cannot actually explain that.

Anyway, now the problem just happens so often that I cannot really use my computer any more.

Unfortunately I also have another problem with my hard drive, which I think is unrelated. It basically seems to be dying. Any program that accesses the hard drive could become very slow during the access, even causing the program or the whole computer to freeze up for a few seconds during the access (Firefox is the worst since it loves to write lots of little files constantly). When this starts to happen, I run chkdsk and it finds bad clusters that it recovers and removes, and then it's OK again. But a few weeks or months later it happens again with more bad clusters, so I guess the drive is just slowly dying.

I still have a Western Digital drive from over 10 years ago that is going strong and never had a problem, but this Samsung drive has been problematic and I've had it less than a year.

Anyway, this post has taken me hours to do, and is now being typed in Notepad and saved every sentence because I'm sick of losing it!!!! A combination of frequent BSOD restarts and Firefox being slow is making it a misery.

Do you think I am right in thinking it is the RAM, or could it be the motherboard or something else? How can I further diagnose it, and is there a solution other than just getting new RAM? So far I have reduced the memory frequency from 1333 to 1066 to 800, not sure if it might have helped very slightly.

This is my RAM: http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-ddr3-pc3-16000-gold-low-voltage-dual-channel.html
Says it has a lifetime warranty, dunno if that is true

Cheers

 

[Hagar]

Try each stick independantly in each motherboard slot, see if you can identify a pattern. bad stick or bad slot. If you have a good stick which works in all slots, it is unlikely to be the motherboard.

Also wait to see if it is a ram problem before changing anything else. I have had no problems at all with OCZ gold even overclocked, some people may have had.

 

[RJC]

I had issues with the triple channel gold memory, first set would Blue Screen when Windows staret to load (failed memtest) and the second set coursed stability issues, I would get BSOD when running Prime and would fail Intel Burn Test, this resulted in me sending the motherboard and cpu back for testing and these passed ok.

At the same these were being shipped back I bought some Patriot memory and these run fine in my system, soon as I put the Gold in I would get problems, returned for a refund and Ocuk confirmed these were faulty as well.

 

[Carth]

I did find it was one of the sticks that was the problem, but rather strangely, before I RMAd it I noticed that there was a tiny piece of cardboard that had got stuck inside it. I managed to get it out, and then I put the stick back in and ran Memtest for 40 minutes without error. So.. fingers crossed that it was just a stray piece of packaging that got sucked in and ended up there, and it will be OK now.