Is my ram bad? Never had a "bad" piece, normally it's good or dead.

[bigshooter]

So I bought 512megs pc2700 of crucial ram from newegg to go with my 2x256megs of crucial pc2100. The problem is, I'm getting explorer crashes all the time now. I'll be reading a web page and all of a sudden my task bar disappears and everything resets itself in the background. This happens a lot. It's weird because I don't always get the error box about explorer.exe has taken a dump, sometimes it just resets. Is this a sign of bad memory? It's the only error I have. WinXP Pro has given me explorer problems in the past, but never this many. I also lowered my swapfile down to 256megs. Any ideas? I hope the ram isn't bad because it's a pain to return to newegg sometimes.

 

[spanky]

is the problem aleviated if u take the extra 512 dimm out?

 

[bozo1]

Why not run diagnostics on the memory? memtest86 for example.

 

[thorin]

MemTest86

 

[blackhawk]

Run memtest with all sticks and individually.

Could be settings too. Memory isn't exactly the same.

I had problems with top end ram from two manufacturers that wouldn't work together but did fine individually.

I also have 4 sticks of crucial 2100/256 and a stick of 512/2700 and have run combinations of this together without problem.

The 2100 and 2700 seems to be the same stuff and capable of the same speeds.
I'm not real aggressive with my mem settings though.