memtest32

[Fistandantilis]

how do I use this? I dont understand the directions too well. when I start it it asks me to type a image? where do I get that info?

 

[Nothinman]

Did you try just hitting enter?

 

[Fistandantilis]

no, but I will

 

[Nothinman]

And by "start it" I assume you mean boot from the CD or floppy, right?

 

[Fistandantilis]

yeah it was asking for a floppy but i dont have on3e installed so oh well guess I wont be testing my ram

 

[Jeff7]

I'm not sure what page everyone is on, so here, since you don't have a floppy drive:


Go here.

Press Ctrl+F or use the menus to get to the Find Text dialog. Copy and paste this:

Download - Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO (.zip)

I'm not hotlinking, don't know if they like that or not, or if it matters.

Anyway, get that file. Decompress it, open the image with your burning software, and write it to a CD-RW. Boot off of that. It should execute automatically and begin testing your RAM.

 

[luigi1]

If you google memtest theres a windows app (freeware) that tests your memory. It helped me find my bad ram.

 

[Fistandantilis]

Originally posted by: luigi1
If you google memtest theres a windows app (freeware) that tests your memory. It helped me find my bad ram.

thanks

 

[Nothinman]

If you google memtest theres a windows app (freeware) that tests your memory. It helped me find my bad ram.

Nothing that runs inside of a recent OS can reliably test memory.

 

[Fistandantilis]

is there such an app that could test vram?

 

[luigi1]

I dont claim that an diag that runs under an op sys is as good as a bootable app. But if the ram that your op sys is on is bad your blue screening. I wasnt it was errors in BF2 and vamp the masquerade (esp vamp because I never crashed to desktop on my old ram). It allowed me to isolate the bad stick. It worked for me , it MAY work for you. I dont have a floppy and a blank cd. Not to mention burning CD;s is not a productive thing for me. Its really a bad thing that burning CD's is so hit and miss and floppys are so low in capacity as to be useless in a puter.

 

[Nothinman]

The thing is, even though the app can allocate a ton of memory and write values and then see if they're the same when it reads them back again, it can't reliably tell you where the bad memory is because of virtual memory. Each userland process has it's own set virtual addresses (2G worth on a 32-bit system) and when an allocation is requested the OS fulfills it from whatever physical memory is free and maps it into the virtual address space for that process. So even though that process may see the requested memory range start at 0xABCDEF it might physically start at 0x123456 and there's no way the process can find that out.

The only way to use that app to isolate a bad stick of memory is to pull them all but 1 and keep running it over and over swapping sticks until one of them gives you errors. It would be much less hassle just to waste a CD on the memtest86 bootable ISO.