weird hardware (memory?) problem?!

[lemmiwinks]

On friday I installed an additional gig of RAM into my dell 8400 system. The memory I used was exactly the same as the one installed by Dell (DDR2 4300). Everything worked fine and the change was detected by my system. However, last night my computer suddendly froze on me. I rebooted and was presented with a screen that said there had been a hardware or software problem and windows was being shut down. I took the new memory out and everything seemed to work ok. I put it back and was again given the screen after windows and just finished loading. The error message went something like:

A problem has beed deteched and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

It goes on to say I should check any new hardware or software I have recently installed, suggesting that I could trying disabling BIOS memory options such as caching and shadowing(non of which are in my BIOS).

It seems weird that this work be a memory problem since everything worked fine for about a day and a half(in which I used my computer quite a bit). Does anyone have any ideas to what could be going on?

Also, when I reboot with just my old memory, I receive a message saying windows has recovered from a serious error and that the following files will be recorded in the report:

C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini052905-01.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\****\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER1.tmp.dir00\sysdata.xml

Lastly, I do not run SP2, would this make a difference?

 

[rise]

i don't know if its a sp2 issue. have you tried the new memory alone in the same slots the old were in? it could be you have bad sticks, i'd check that first.

also matters check this

 

[lemmiwinks]

I ran that memory test with only the new memory in my system. At 1,500,000 errors I kinda figured I had found the problem. Am I safe to assume that the memory modules (or at least one of them) is bad?

 

[krcat1]

Yes. Some people will RMA Memory with only one error.

Test them one at a time to see which one is bad.