Can bad memory cause hard reboot?

[rkoenn]

Last weekend I built a used machine for a friend from parts. MSI nVidia motherboard with Sempron 2600 CPU. I pulled the DDR memory from his old Dell which was 512 MB and 128MB DDR module. I used the 512 along with a 256 I had laying around. I then installed windows XP with no problems and updated XP and the hardware. He picked up the box and took it home. When he tried running Civilization on it it crashed spuriously with a hard reboot. I got it back and at first it did not crash. However soon after with Civ running and attempting the online update it would reboot, no blue screen or nothing, simply a hard reboot unannounced. I then changed the memory to 2 256 MB modules in dual channel mode. However I could not run Civ as he did not have a complete install and I was missing disk 2 to reinstall. I decided to put on Medal of Honor and after doing that ran it on the machine. It ran perfectly and better than I expected for this machine. It also has a Sapphire Radeon 9600 video card. I played around with Medal and left the system on all day with no problems. Tonight I will reinstall Civ since he gave me disk 2 and will see what happens. However it does appear that things look good right now. So the question is would bad memory cause this to happen? If so I suspect that XP itself for what I did never hit the bad memory location but the game did. Thanks in advance for information concerning this problem.

 

[Nothinman]

Bad memory can cause all sort of strange problems. I would also make sure that it's not really a BSOD because by default they reboot immediately.