- May 19, 2011
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I upgraded a customer's computer mid March this year. Among the upgrades was doubling the memory from 4GB DDR3 to 8GB simply by adding a module. I ran memtest86 7.4 for its standard 4 passes, no problems. Two months roll by, no problems, then a string of random bluescreens (including MEMORY_MANAGEMENT) and Firefox crashing consistently within a couple of minutes of starting.
The customer is elderly and is recovering from surgery, and because the computer is one of her lifelines to the world I thought it best not to take it away for testing but went straight for my hunch that either the extra memory isn't completely compatible with the module it's paired up with for dual channel or it's developed a fault.
Today I decided to pull out one of my similar-age Intel boxes to run it just with the suspect module and have memtest86 go to town on it. >1000 errors in 15 seconds.
Admittedly I acted on my hunch early on during the appointment last Friday to remove the suspect module (I felt that Firefox's stability might return simply by removing the module), but I would have thought with that many errors that Windows would BSOD pretty much the moment it went beyond the 4GB barrier (or maybe before then due to the nature of dual-channel), but apparently not. Firefox's stability didn't return until I reinstalled it either. A Firefox update had gone on in the last few days (the 16th, IIRC), so I guess the faulty memory corrupted the update.
I don't often see faulty memory these days so that surprised me, but also the fact that it had passed memtest86 recently. Stuff just dies I guess! I wonder how Crucial's going to react given that they no longer sell DDR3 RAM.
The customer is elderly and is recovering from surgery, and because the computer is one of her lifelines to the world I thought it best not to take it away for testing but went straight for my hunch that either the extra memory isn't completely compatible with the module it's paired up with for dual channel or it's developed a fault.
Today I decided to pull out one of my similar-age Intel boxes to run it just with the suspect module and have memtest86 go to town on it. >1000 errors in 15 seconds.
Admittedly I acted on my hunch early on during the appointment last Friday to remove the suspect module (I felt that Firefox's stability might return simply by removing the module), but I would have thought with that many errors that Windows would BSOD pretty much the moment it went beyond the 4GB barrier (or maybe before then due to the nature of dual-channel), but apparently not. Firefox's stability didn't return until I reinstalled it either. A Firefox update had gone on in the last few days (the 16th, IIRC), so I guess the faulty memory corrupted the update.
I don't often see faulty memory these days so that surprised me, but also the fact that it had passed memtest86 recently. Stuff just dies I guess! I wonder how Crucial's going to react given that they no longer sell DDR3 RAM.
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