Could my RAM be dead?

[tuzz]

Last night I installed Apache, MySQL and PHP to do some website dev on my laptop. Everything was working fine, database queries working and Apache was serving up pages properly, however after about two hours Windows XP blue-screened.

Upon restart it blue-screened again, before all the main services could be loaded up. I assumed it was Apache and disabled it - only for XP to blue screen again. Upon starting XP, messages intermittently pop up saying things like "Dantz Retroexpress could not start up: Memory could not be read" or messages to that effect. Google Desktop also comes up with a similar message, as does the GMail plugin for Google Desktop.

Even when starting in Safe mode, XP blue-screens! Although I noticed it takes a while longer for it to happen, i.e. I actually got Firefox to open up while in safe mode (usually it will blue-screen before Firefox loads up in normal mode).

I'm getting a variety of blue screen error messages including:

----------------
*** STOP: 0x00000024

or

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
*** STOP: 0x0000000A

or

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
*** STOP: 0x00000050
--------------------

My first guess is dodgy RAM, as I've installed a new 1GB stick about 2 months ago - and it was generic RAM. It was too late last night to fire up the memory diagnostics but tonight I'm going to try reseating the RAM, then memtest86 and then to take out the 1GB chip altogether and see how it runs.

 

[stevty2889]

Could be a combination of ram going bad, and corrupted hard drive. If memtest comes out ok, I would run chkdsk, and also run the hard drive mfg's diagnostics. The IRQL error can often be driver related as well. Updated any drivers or added new hardware(besides the ram) lately?

 

[tuzz]

At the time of buying the RAM I also got an external hard drive... I'd been using it last night as well, but I've used it many times in the past few months and it's been working great. I haven't installed any new drivers for a long time, 6 months or more.

While the computer booted up it ran chkdsk, I did notice that a few files were removed - I think the reason was "invalid indexes" - not sure sure on the terminology.

 

[tuzz]

Yep - the RAM is dead. Memtest86+ reported over 40,000 errors over the first four tests, at which I quit the memory tester. XP is running fine with just the 256MB chip I originally had - although the system is running like a dog now.