Just lost 2 hours because of a bad RAM stick I didn't check first

Last Tuesday I was troubleshooting a Dell OptiPlex that kept crashing during Windows updates. I spent over an hour checking drivers, reinstalling the OS, even swapping out the hard drive. Finally I decided to run MemTest86 on a hunch and bam, one of the two 4GB sticks had errors on address 0x7F. Ngl, I felt dumb for not testing the RAM first since it's step one in the diagnostic flow. Do you guys always test RAM before anything else on weird crashes or skip it unless there's blue screens?

2 comments

2 Comments

perry.jessica12d agoMost Upvoted

Buddy of mine once spent two days trying to figure out why his home server kept corrupting files. Replaced the CPU, the PSU, even the SATA cables. Turned out it was a bad stick of ECC RAM. He still brings it up whenever anyone mentions troubleshooting.

the_derek12d ago

Did you swap out the RAM sticks one at a time or run both together? I had a similar situation with an old HP desktop last year. It would boot fine but freeze up randomly after an hour or so. I replaced the whole motherboard before thinking to check the RAM. Turned out one of the DDR3 sticks had a chip that would overheat under load. Never really saw full crashes just stutters. Now I always run MemTest for at least a few passes before doing anything else. Saves a lot of headache.

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