[PCTECH] Memory Testing update (was:Adventures in near(?)-futility)

["Dan Bale" <dbale@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A follow-up to Monday's post about memory testing.

I took John's advice and downloaded memtest86.  The memory passed all the
standard tests and, AFAICT, it passed all of the extended tests before the
program itself bombed; note that NO memory errors were reported, but the
program issued an "interrupt exception" or somesuch.  This happened twice
after overnight testing.

I went back online to see if there were any resources to explain the error.
Didn't find that, except for a few references that described some bugs found
in the program causing it to crash in some cases, and it turns out that
memtest86 hasn't been updated in a few years.  Since it was published under
GNU license, someone else took over and produced memtest86plus, but I was a
bit wary since I found no other online references to that version.

But I did find a reference to a memory tester put out by no other than
Microsoft!  You'd think that they would manage to mention that in the KB
articles that blame defective memory!!!  Granted, they call it a beta, but I
think it's been out for awhile.  It's called Windows Memory Diagnostic and I
couldn't find it searching on M$'s site, but I fumbled around for awhile in
support and found this link:

  http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Ran this test (the whole "suite") starting last night and this morning it
was still chugging away,  on its 6th pass, and no errors reported.

db