Advice - bad RAM

[Rei Shinozuka]

i had a flaky system (Jaunty amd64) which turned out to be a bad stick 
of memory (4gb).  memtest86 was throwing hundred of errors.   I was 
frankly happy that it was a memory stick rather than some other piece of 
hardware or software misconfiguration.  When I replaced the stick, my 
problems went away.

-rei


Chris Mohler wrote:
> OK, so my system has been increasingly unstable over the past week.  I
> was hoping that b/c I tend to install everything under the sun and
> hack it to bits that I was facing a software issue.  Symptoms: FF
> segfaults, various lookup symbol errors, XP (in VirtualBox) throwing
> BSoD, xorg crashing.
>
> I was thinking of doing a fresh install of 9.04 (currently 8.10
> upgraded from 8.04 - I usually do a clean install but I was just
> curious last time).  But before the install, I ran memtest86 and lo
> and behold there were 10 errors in the first minute.  I doubt this
> bodes well.   I'm doing some more research right now, but wanted to
> know if anyone has first-hand experience with dealing with (possibly)
> bad RAM.  I know that there is (or was) a kernel-level program for
> "sitting on" bad addresses - anyone used this?  Also - anyone ever
> have false positives with memtest86?
>
> I'm also probably hunting for new RAM - this machine is a Dell Vostro
> 1500 laptop.
>
> Thoughts, comments, advice welcome.
> Chris
>
>