So, I've been having problems related to file corruption and crashing for the past two or 3 months. Very frustrating, and I couldn't quite suss what it was. Everything suggested it was RAM, yet Memtest86+ could never find anything wrong (and I tested for many, many hours, using both sticks together and seperately in the same slot, etc).
Prime95/SP2004 was more useful, but it was still somewhat vague. For example, I could run blend test for hours and nothing would occur, then I could run it again the next day and it would fail almost immediately:
http://www.demon83.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/images/gawd.jpg
Error message doesn't exactly say 'omg your RAM is duff' either. Anyway, got a program called 'MemTest' from http://hcidesign.com/memtest/ that runs under Windows instead. Tested each stick seperately as before, only set a small amount of RAM (350 meg of a 1024 stick). First stick was left for a while, nothing found, switched to other stick (all the time using the same DDR slot) and got repeated errors within 2-3 seconds of starting test! Couldn't quite believe it. Rebooted, tried test again, exactly the same thing - instantly found errors. Switch back to other stick, no errors.
Anyway, I'm not bashing Memtest86+. It's a useful program obviously, but don't take its results for gospel like I rather stupidly did, else you can potentially waste a hell of a lot of your time thinking it's something else. I'd strongly recommend you use the windows app mentioned above too if you can.
Prime95/SP2004 was more useful, but it was still somewhat vague. For example, I could run blend test for hours and nothing would occur, then I could run it again the next day and it would fail almost immediately:
http://www.demon83.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/images/gawd.jpg
Error message doesn't exactly say 'omg your RAM is duff' either. Anyway, got a program called 'MemTest' from http://hcidesign.com/memtest/ that runs under Windows instead. Tested each stick seperately as before, only set a small amount of RAM (350 meg of a 1024 stick). First stick was left for a while, nothing found, switched to other stick (all the time using the same DDR slot) and got repeated errors within 2-3 seconds of starting test! Couldn't quite believe it. Rebooted, tried test again, exactly the same thing - instantly found errors. Switch back to other stick, no errors.
Anyway, I'm not bashing Memtest86+. It's a useful program obviously, but don't take its results for gospel like I rather stupidly did, else you can potentially waste a hell of a lot of your time thinking it's something else. I'd strongly recommend you use the windows app mentioned above too if you can.
