The techs who fed you the line about the bootup memory test are drones.
They have no idea about what they are talking about.
There are numerous incompatibilities between motherboards and certain memory
strip configurations.
I recently ran into an interesting one, wherein certain Crucial/Micron
strips would ALWAYS crash WinME (strangely not Win2K) or Linux when
installed on Intel 815 and VIA Apollo based motherboards.
These same strips worked fine on BX based motherboards.
Memory test programs continually reported no problems whatsoever.
Testing revealed that the data lines would not "come ready" fast enough for
the 815 and VIA chipsets after a strobe.
Ironically Crucial/Micron is big on touting it's reliability factor...
right.
A very simple and faily good indicator of problems is to use DOS's Himem
with the /TESTMEM option.
I.E. Make a DOS boot disk and add this line to the config.sys after placing
himem.sys on the disk...
DEVICE = HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:ON
This is surprisingly good in catching memory problems which will foul up
Linux and would have most likely demonstrated problems with the memory you
had.
It's not foolproof but I've seen it catch things that even hardware testers
and good test suites do not.
-JMS
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Myers, Dennis R NWO
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 11:01 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE: [newbie] Testing for bad RAM-solved and update
I took the suspect ram sticks back to the shop where I bought them and the
tech put it in a windows box and booted it up. It booted right up, so they
said the memory was tested ok. They gave me an exchange anyway, but I
thought it interesting that their test was to boot it and let the bios test
tell them if it was ok. That's fine i'm back to 256M and it was instantly
recognized in LM7.2 on boot. Dennis M.
