[OT] -- Memory Vendors

Micron or Mushkin are good, certainly. I usually go to Newegg.Com and sort by the ratings until I get to whatever's cheapest that still has, 4+ stars. :-)

I was thinking "who can I trust to buy off the web", but knowing good manufacturers is nice, too.

My favorite vendor is Staples Office Supply. If the stuff doesn't work, bring it back.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Staples Office Supply. If the stuff doesn't work, return it back.

VLV

Crucial.

I'll second that. Bought a load of stuff from Newegg in December and it all works fine. Their packaging skills could IMHO be improved though.

Crucial (micron) and Corsair.

Any company that gives a 100% money-back guarantee (no restocking fees) and pays for return shipping. The office supply stores (Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot) and local Fry's are good here.

Avoid any memory modules with heatsinks on them or whose chips lack a chip makers' markings. Otherwise you'll get modules made with UTT (UnTesTed) chips, which are actually probably tested but rejected and then dumped on the wholesale market. But AFAIK,the only such modules available on the retail market, at least in the US, are Crucial, which have chips made by Micron, Elpida, or Samsung (whole module may be from Samsung). Fry's often sells Crucial really cheap.

BTW, I've found that MemTest86 fails more modules than MemTest+ does, and Gold Memory 5.07 finds more errors than Gold Memory 6.92 does.

I used to like Corsair -- zero problems with SDR and DDR, but when several friends and I bought 2GB pairs of their PC6400 that looked like this:

last Jan. for $15 after rebate, most of us received at least one bad module per pair. I tried two pairs, and each pair had a module that wouldn't even let the computer boot.

My experience a year earlier with OCZ Gold 1GB PC6400 pairs was 2 bad pairs out of 3, and each time I went back to the store, I met someone else returning the same model OCZ.

I don't know anyone who's gotten bad Crucial PC6400 memory, except for the old 2.2 volt Ballistix.

I'm surprised nobody mentions Kingston??? I always buy Kingston modules.

I've found the website for MemTest86; how in the heck would I use them? Just unzip, say,

Or is there a page with instructions?

Thanks, Rich

Yes.

Some Linux distributors also offer this as a boot option on their installation media (boot manager boots the floppy image directly off the CD).

In the zip archive is a README file with directions. Unzip the whole archive and run either INSTALL.BAT or INSTALL64.BAT to create the boot floppy, then restart the computer and boot from that floppy.

You really should also try MemTest86, from

My overall failure rate for new Kingston modules has been around 20%, an I once had a run of 11-12 PC3200 512MB modules where 8 failed MemTest86 or Gold Memory. While Kingston doesn't use UTT (UnTesTed) chips as almost all other retailers but Crucial do, Kingston does grade chips on its own (they buy whole wafers and slice and package them), apparently not to the same standards used by the chip makers because I've always been able to overclock Crucial modules but not Kingstons, except for Kingston 1GB PC5300 DDR2. OTOH it seems that if you complain to Kingston modules failing in several machines, Kingston always replaces them with modules that always work error-free.

I'm thinking the same (embedded?) thing (i.e. getting older machine to do some new job).

You may encounter slight incompatibility between chipsets and DDR memories. Not all DDRs will work on any chipset. No brainer is Infineon DDR333/PC2700, for a handfull fo $$$ like these:

Finally figured out to try that, and lo and behold, INSTALL.BAT reported that I've got a broken FD controller.. )-; I've been throwing away floppies when Doze said, "unable to format disk". )-;

I also tried dd if=./memtestp.bin of=/dev/fd0 ; dd didn't complain, but when I went to boot it, I got:

Guess I need a new computer anyway. Sigh. (I got this one off ebay about five years ago.)

Thanks anyway, Rich

If you have Linux, then most (if not all) Linux bootloaders can of course load bootable binaries, like memtest86 and memtest86+. No need to mess around with floppies.

Sounds good, but how would I do this? I use LILO (Slackware 11.0); would I just point to the binary instead of one of the kernels? I can install and configure a distro, but a raw binary? Is it something simple, like a single line in lilo.conf? Would I have to dedicate a whole partition to it?

I could also do the ISO, but I haven't taught myslf how to use cdwriter yet. (too lazy - looking for the easiest way out. ;-) )

Thanks, Rich

Just add the following to lilo.conf (replace /boot with the appropriate directory):

image=/boot/memtestp.bin label=memtest