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I know this sounds quite unbelievible... But some of the memory I've come into contact within the last 4 years has been on a ticking time bomb and has become corrupt within the last month or so!
The first, a friends system I built just over a year ago. AMD 3200+ Socket 939 w/ 2x1Gb Patriot DDR400 started crashing randomly whilst in game. Ran Memtest86 and found that one of the stick had gone bad, no biggie right they're still under warranty. RMA, replace and renew no questions asked.
The second, my roommates PC AMD AM2 3800+ X2 w/ 2Gb Crucial DDR667 barely five months old, nearly had a meltdown one night while gaming. Screen froze and kinda looked like a general BSOD... Wrong! Powering up the system was possible but the monitor its self had fried, good thing that was only 3 months old and under Office Depot Warranty. Within minutes of switching out the LCD with an old 17" IBM display I had lying around the system seized within windows and refused to resume windows until one of the ram sticks was removed. Memtest86 once again confirmed a bad stick.
Case #3: "Debbie's 'puter" one of my best friends girlfriends old Dell Celeron 450mhz w/ 96mb SDRAM was in dire need of some work about six months ago. So with a little magic from my parts box I was able to Frankenstein a P3 900mhz beast with 384Mb of SDRAM! Worked great till about 2 1/2-3 Weeks ago... Same thing random crashes major system instability problems, Memtest only had to run for about a minute to find errors this time.
Now chapter four, hopefully the last in this awful book. My buddy who's girlfriends computer just went "poof" started having system instability issues as well, same symptoms, random crashes and reboots... I couldn't believe it! Nah, scratch that I nearly refused to believe it... I hoped it was just a driver issue and after a few days of trouble shooting I finally just decided to run memtest for longer than 30 minutes. Low and behold the AMD 3200+ socket 754 2x512Mb DDR400 system i built nearly four years ago has a bad ram stick now too...
There really hasn't been a constant in either of these four cases which is whats baffling me. All four of the PC's have been built by me but only one of them had had my hands in them in the last month(case #4) installing a wireless G card. At first I thought it was a bad power thing because the first three were not protected by a UPS and we have had some quite amazing thunder storms here in Nebraska lately... Which was a great theory until this last one arrived. This machine has been on a UPS since the day it was put together. I am always very cautious with handling computer components, if I'm not using an ESD strap I am grounded with a hand, finger, elbow, toe, etc. I have built quite a few machines personally within the last seven years, not to mention hundreds at Compaq/ Hewlett Packard when I worked there. My grief now is how long until something happens to another friends/ cleints machine? Why has nothing happened to my OC'd beast? Will this ever end? Stay tuned for further updates and thank you for listening to my rantings.
-Acid out.
The first, a friends system I built just over a year ago. AMD 3200+ Socket 939 w/ 2x1Gb Patriot DDR400 started crashing randomly whilst in game. Ran Memtest86 and found that one of the stick had gone bad, no biggie right they're still under warranty. RMA, replace and renew no questions asked.
The second, my roommates PC AMD AM2 3800+ X2 w/ 2Gb Crucial DDR667 barely five months old, nearly had a meltdown one night while gaming. Screen froze and kinda looked like a general BSOD... Wrong! Powering up the system was possible but the monitor its self had fried, good thing that was only 3 months old and under Office Depot Warranty. Within minutes of switching out the LCD with an old 17" IBM display I had lying around the system seized within windows and refused to resume windows until one of the ram sticks was removed. Memtest86 once again confirmed a bad stick.
Case #3: "Debbie's 'puter" one of my best friends girlfriends old Dell Celeron 450mhz w/ 96mb SDRAM was in dire need of some work about six months ago. So with a little magic from my parts box I was able to Frankenstein a P3 900mhz beast with 384Mb of SDRAM! Worked great till about 2 1/2-3 Weeks ago... Same thing random crashes major system instability problems, Memtest only had to run for about a minute to find errors this time.
Now chapter four, hopefully the last in this awful book. My buddy who's girlfriends computer just went "poof" started having system instability issues as well, same symptoms, random crashes and reboots... I couldn't believe it! Nah, scratch that I nearly refused to believe it... I hoped it was just a driver issue and after a few days of trouble shooting I finally just decided to run memtest for longer than 30 minutes. Low and behold the AMD 3200+ socket 754 2x512Mb DDR400 system i built nearly four years ago has a bad ram stick now too...
There really hasn't been a constant in either of these four cases which is whats baffling me. All four of the PC's have been built by me but only one of them had had my hands in them in the last month(case #4) installing a wireless G card. At first I thought it was a bad power thing because the first three were not protected by a UPS and we have had some quite amazing thunder storms here in Nebraska lately... Which was a great theory until this last one arrived. This machine has been on a UPS since the day it was put together. I am always very cautious with handling computer components, if I'm not using an ESD strap I am grounded with a hand, finger, elbow, toe, etc. I have built quite a few machines personally within the last seven years, not to mention hundreds at Compaq/ Hewlett Packard when I worked there. My grief now is how long until something happens to another friends/ cleints machine? Why has nothing happened to my OC'd beast? Will this ever end? Stay tuned for further updates and thank you for listening to my rantings.
-Acid out.
