pythorlh's Journal: [Ask a subset] - Computer Weirdness

OK, so fate and finances have determined that I won't be building myself a new PC anytime soon. What I did do is get myself some new memory, replacing my 2 256M PC2100 chips with 2 512M PC2100 chips. I would have gone higher, but my current motherboard tops out at 1G. Now for the weirdness:
 

I leave my PC on for hours and even days at a time. My habit is to turn it off while I'm at work, but it stays on all night, and sometimes is left on during the day for Azureus to do its thing (Azureus is a Bittorrent client). A week ago, I came home one night to find that Azureus had crashed. Everything else worked, but trying to restart the Azureus failed, so I rebooted the PC.

Or tried to, anyway. It failed to reboot. Before reaching the pretty blue Windows XP screen, it would flash a blue screen error message, and immediately reboot, so I couldn't read the error. Safe mode, in all its various flavors, did the same. I tried booting from my XP CD, hoping that I could get Recovery console to work. I'd get the Windows Setup screen, and it would load for a while, and then give me a page fault error.

Looking on the internet, I suspected some hardware failure. I disconnected everything except my primary harddrive, CPU, and memory, but no change. I removed one of my new memory chips, and it booted, ran an automatic chkdsk, and worked. After replacing everything except my modem and floppy drive, neither of which I use, it still worked.

Last night I was awoken by the sound of my PC repeatedly re-booting. It had apparently shut down, and could not get back into Windows. Symptoms the same as before. This time, I removed my secondary IDE cable and second memory stick only. Reboot, chkdsk, and everything seems fine again. I was getting ready for work though, so I haven't really tested it yet.

Opinions? I suspect my new memory may be bad, but I thought memory problems were either always bad, or very erratic. I don't understand why I couldn't even boot from a CD, unless the memory is totally worthless. But... if the memory is that bad, why does it work fine after the chkdsk has completed, at least for a while? Maybe it's a hard drive that's likely to die soon, but why would removing one stick of memory and a couple optical drives fix that enough that it can get to chkdsk, when nothing else does? I'm stumped, but I really need to figure out what the problem is so that I don't lose this PC.

[Edit] - Looks like RAM issues is the consensus. I've got a Memtest CD around somewhere, so I'll run that tonight. Thank You, everyone.

RAM

[RailGunner]

I suspect my new memory may be bad, but I thought memory problems were either always bad, or very erratic.

Not necessarily - when memory is allocated off the heap by the kernel your aren't guranteed to get the same address due to memory fragmenting, etc.

I don't understand why I couldn't even boot from a CD, unless the memory is totally worthless. But... if the memory is that bad, why does it work fine after the chkdsk has completed, at least for a while?

Probably a bad chip on the RAM board, that may or

Re:RAM

[nizo]

I second the idea that it is memory; if you can download the Ultimate boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] and let it test the living daylights out of the memory (it should have a smaller memory footprint, so you may have better luck booting this CD). You are following proper static procedures and using a grounding strap right? The company I work for is full of electrical engineers who are absolutely rabid about this; they told me that static discharge can damage a component and you won't even know it until it fails later.

Re:RAM

[Tet]

Start with the most likely culprit: Return the RAM and exchange it.

Well, it would probably make sense to test it first before making that assumption. When my machine started playing up a few weeks ago, Memtest86 [memtest86.com] showed it to be a fault with one on my sticks of RAM. Once I took that out, the machine was fine again.

You can either download a bootable ISO from their web site, or if you're running a sane OS, just fetch it via yum or apt-get and put an entry in your grub config to boot from it.

Re:RAM

[jawtheshark]

Exactly what I'd do... There is not much more to say, really :-D

PS

[arb]

One of my first checks now with dodgy PCs is the power supply. I doubt that it would be the case in your situation, but it couldn't hurt to check it out...

Other than that, try swapping the old RAM back in for a little while and see if the problems resurface?