Hard Drive or Ram Problem?

[Prince of Persia]

Recently my computer completely freezes or reboots randomly when Window loads up. Luckily it seems to be working now, but last night it gave an error right before it crashed. Something along the lines that it couldn't write to memory. Is this a HD problem or Ram problem? What steps should I take in order to find out what the conflict is?

 

[ojai00]

To see if it really is the RAM, try testing the different sticks, if you have more than one in your computer. If not, replace that with one lying around to see if you get the same error message. Hope this helps.

 

[nnnyyy]

try to run memtest86 on the suspicious stick of ram. it's pretty good at determining bad memory.

 

[Whitedog]

More than likely RAM problem from your problem description... A lot of crap memory is being produced and sold these days. Ya gotta be careful what you get.

 

[piasabird]

You could have a memory hole in one of the programs your computer is running. This is very hard to detect. Basically you just turn one program off at a time. As an example, the Home-Click networking software written by MS and distributed by 3Com had a DLL with a memory leak in it (HCDETECT.DLL).

 

[Prince of Persia]

Well my computer seemed to be running fine today, I even defragged my hard drive to see if that would cause any problems. Everything was running fine until I tried to play Mafia, and then it rebooted and went into the same vicious cycle of completeting rebooting. I took one stick out then it booted fine. My memory is from crucial so at least I got a lifetime warranty.

Where do I find memtest86?

 

[skatertech]

Originally posted by: Prince of Persia
Where do I find memtest86?

Hint Hint

You can find memtest86 here.