windows failing to load ?troubleshooting

[ritcH]

I have a pretty old computer that I built about 10 years ago, running windows 7 now, still pretty fast when it works.

Core i7 920 @ 2.67GHz 8 virtual cores
10GB RAM
Windows 7 Pro
Intel SSD x2 in RAID
x2 Samsung 1TB HDDs
Radeon R9 200 Series
Sony Blueray DVD-ROM and Sony DvD-RW
Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard

Most of the time when I load windows it will hang and apart from being able to move the mouse around, any attempt to open any menus or folders will fail and cause the mouse cursor to change to a turning circle icon. Restarting gets me back to the same situation.

This happened about 5 years ago and I ended up testing various things and in the end found the RAM was pretty corrupt so I bought some new RAM on ebay and it has been fairly stable since, except occasionally the above problem happens but usually not more than twice, now it's almost every boot up.

Just wondering if there is any good open source system analysis software I can use? I can boot up into safe mode with networking. Pretty sure it will be the RAM again, what do people use to analyse RAM these days?

Thanks for any help.

 

[ritcH]

In the end I created a memtest x86 boot disk and 5 years ago I found one of the 3 RAM dimms was corrupt so left the other two in.

This time I I removed the other 2 old ones and used the 3x2GB dimms I bought last time, then ran memtest and found no errors. Windows seems to be booting nicely again so I guess one of the old dimms that I had left in 5 years ago was corrupt.

Here's to another 5 years!