National Bad RAM Day

| Monday, November 21, 2011
I just made it up. Deal with it.

My computer had developed a habit of suddenly restarting while playing Civilization. I thought it might be overheating because I hadn't put back on the side panel of the computer, with a fan in it, which might be the main source of incoming air. That didn't fix it and I didn't really think it was overheating anyway, based on the "touch stuff and see if I get burned or zapped" test yielding negative results (in the diagnostic community, negative means positive, which is the least confusing thing we say).

My next suspicion was a bad stick of RAM. So I did the logical thing, switched them into the other pair of slots. That didn't fix it, which confirmed my suspicion.

Finally I resorted to pulling out one of the two 2gb sticks and replacing it with a pair of 512mb sticks from my old computer. This wasn't as big of a loss as it sounds, since Windows only seemed to recognize 3.5gb of the supposed 4gb total, so I only lost 512mb. Maybe there is some performance impact from having the unpaired stick, but I've not noticed. It is certainly offset by the reliability gain.

Coming tomorrow, plus or minus a month, Skyrim!

6 comments:

Kring said...

You probably already know memtest?

http://www.memtest.org/

If not, let it run for 24 hour and see what happens.

Syl said...

I look forward to your Skyrim comments. :)
I have been sucked in completely.

Klepsacovic said...

@Kring: I'd tried to run a memory test, but gave up after it did not immediately work. I think I've identified the failing stick already.

@Syl: I could fill time with Oblivion comments. When everyone else started Skyrim, I started Oblivion. And when I woke up, my weekend was gone.

Syl said...

"And when I woke up, my weekend was gone. " - that happened to me exactly! =D

Paul said...

You should also know about this event: http://xkcd.com/972/

You can thank me later.

Klepsacovic said...

@Syl: This only confirms my claim that daylight savings time is a myth, that whatever we supposedly gain by changing clocks is stolen back later.

@Paul: My tongue was cut out years ago for trolling in the wrong place, so that won't work on me.

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