[ubuntu-in] Big Mystery. (Also need help)

[Prateek Sharma]

Hi folks,
	I am having hardware(memory) issues on my laptop (Acer Aspire 5004.
AMD Turion ML-34. 245 MB . SiS chipset). However, the issue is so
strange and mysterious to me i though i'd share it with you guys in
the hope of finding an explanation. ( A bit long though : i;ll try to
highlight the important points)

        It all started about a year ago, i installed a new version of
Kubuntu (Gutsy) and noticed _very_ frequent application crashes. I had
my trusty and extremely stable Kubuntu Fiesty install on another
partition. For the first month or so i decided to fix the Gutsy
install. I failed and so had to go back to Feisty. It crashed a lot
too! It had not done that. ever! I had uptimes of weeks (with standby,
hibernate etc.)! So at first i thought its something very wrong with
Linux. I tried going back to vanilla ubuntu (Gnome) thinking its
Kubuntu's oft-heard instability troubling me.
      * Nothing worked. I decided to compile the kernel, thinking that
the numerous crashes (avg 1 reboot per hour) meant theres something
really messed up with it. And withing seconds of starting the
compilation GCC throwed up a message saying "failed compilation due to
hardware fault etc."(i dont remember exactly, but it was something on
the lines of 'its not GCC's fault.). *
      * So then i realized its something fishy. I mean the kernel is
probably the most compiled program in GCC. And i was compiling a
stable release too.. definitely not a software bug! *
      ** So i ran memtest 86+ which comes with ubuntu. I had run the
program about a year before all these events with no errors. This
time, i was shocked to find about 2000 errors listed! Now it all
dawned. All those Segfaults were due to bad memory! (I have noticed
that all the 'errors' have value 000000200. A;so tests 6,7,8
contribute to all errors)
And i had been harsh on Linux. **
     *** BUT. This story would be a boring one about memory
corruption. Real twist comes now: my machine runs OK under windows.
Yes im typing this from a windows. On Linux the mean time for firefox
before crashing is 5 minutes.(Segfault). ***
      So whats causing windows to be so resilient to memory problems?
Im not saying it runs perfectly, there are application crashes, but
its more like 1/hour instead of 1 per $5 minutes on linux.
       I really, REALLY want to go back to using Linux on this
machine.. but its not possible in the current state. Reinstalling is
out of question(bad memory again!), forget kernel compile or compiling
anything for that matter.
       So, is there anything i can do to salvage the situation? I know
of the bad memory patch, however it needs a kernel compile.

I know its a hardware fault etc, and that u really cant do much about
it. But if windows can run, why cant Linux? How is windows able to
side-step the bad areas to run OK? Atleast the windows kernel runs
fine. I dont have to do reboots etc. Heck, i can even play games
smoothly on windows.  Please Help!

PS: Ive tried to 'fix' the problem on my own for about 6 months now.
So its not that ive not tried to fix it myself.