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PC Memory Tests

Should anyone believe the results of any of those RAM memory tests on PC's that supposedly tell you whether or not you've got a bad bank of memory? I've never had much luck and/or faith in them.

I recently mentioned to a friend that those test results should be viewed with great skepticism because, well....

A) Nothing Microsoft of HP sells these days in PC-Land is worth much more than the cardboard box it's shipped in... (Note: Especially Vista!)

and

B) Isn't it testing the same memory it's actually using to run the test??

I guess (maybe?) the computer could shuffle all those bytes around in high or low memory -- but I barely trust it to know it even has a memory, much less what it puts where.... The result of many years of suffering countless application memory leaks created by supremely- caffinated idiot-programmers and bug-infested compilers.!

Reply to
mpm
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Dude, get a Ubunutu Live CD and use the options when it boots, it'll start memtest, that's reliable.

Reply to
a7yvm109gf5d1

As a7y notes, Memtest86 and Memtest86+ are the usual choice. One of the two are usually the ones bundled with the installation disks. They're both FOSS and are two branches of the same tree; I'd go with Memtest86+ to start but give them both a try.

They can also fire on machine problems that are not due to bad memory as such. Memtest was the standard diagnostic for a motherboard problem I ran into a while back. Some notes on it over at

Give 'm a try. Both are setup to load with ISO images onto boot CDs.

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--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA
Reply to
Rich Webb

Memtest (bootable iso) will still suffer a failure to run if the lower region of memory is bad. Had that happen to me, with one 1Gb module out of 4. Eventually I found out which module was bad, bye swapping stick in the slots. That was after fussing with memtest. Why? I think it was from the Dual channel memory configuration.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

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