Bad RAM is bad RAM......right?

[hech54]

I might be offering a red herring, but does the OP have a SSD?

Nope.

[betwixt]

From the test results, which do not use the normal operating system, it is just a bad ram stick.
You can upgrade of course but a word of caution: some motherboards will not accept mixed RAM sizes, they default to the size of the smallest stick so if for example you used one 1Gb and one 2Gb sticks, it would see the second as 1Gb giving you 2Gb total. If you look in the corner of a stick (if it isn't covered with a heat sink) you will notice a small IC which is actually a small EE memory, maybe 1Kb or less, which holds the name, size and timing information from the ram maufacturer. When starting up, the computer reads this IC to set the signal timing needed by the ram circuits and some boards do not read the EE memory in all slots, assuming instead that the same signals are needed across all the slots. The manual should list the types that can be safely mixed.

Brian.

[fritzi93]

@ betwixt:

Yeah, lemme guess, Sandforce controller? Maybe an OCZ SSD?

Another way an SSD can give you fits is if it gets some corrupted sectors (like from a power outage) and doesn't automatically fix it or mark the sectors bad. Contrary to widespread misinformation you'll find on the web, using chkdsk on an SSD can nudge the drive into fixing bad sectors when manual garbage collection can't. Done it.

But evidently hech's problem has been solved.