BADRAM
A friend was having a problem with his laptop recently.
It had been throwing random errors; programs were crashing (intermittently); when he attempted to wipe it and reload the OS (which he had planned to do anyway), it would serve him up a BSOD (blue screen of death) during the install process.
This kind of problem is truly frustrating: there is no internal consistency in the erroring. If the same thing occurs time and again, it provides a clue as to what might be going wrong with your computer (remember my .dll error messages from a previous post? They all related to the same issue: a problem with the .NET framework.). But when strange, unpredictable, unrelated things are happening, it's like the idiots we love to yell at in monster movies: "Don't go in the dark scary basement along, you jerk!!" Or, "He's the killer! He's the killer! Don't trust him!"
That is to say, once you've figured out the problem, you can't believe you couldn't figure out the problem.
The problem in this case was failing memory.
Part of the problem with failing memory is that it doesn't fail all at once. Kind of like a solenoid in a car.
Huh?
When I was a kid we had an old car on which the solenoid was bad.We kept a little hammer in the car, and when it would refuse to start, one of us (usually me) would get out and tap on the solenoid with the hammer. Usually after a tap or two, it started. It was explained to me that there was typically a "bad area" on the solenoid, and if you could just advance it past that bad area, it would do its job properly and the car would start.
Similarly, when RAM is going bad, it doesn't necessarily fail all at once. So it can, when that particular sector of the memory is being accessed, cause strange and unpredictable things to crash, fail to load, or behave strangely.
Eventually, my friend figured out that the problem was bad RAM, replaced it, problem solved.
But what I learned from this was that earlier in the triaging process, when a computer starts acting up, it's worth the few minutes it takes to test the RAM - and it can be done easily with something called MemTest86+, a free utility from http://www.memtest.org.
No, it's not necessarily something "just anybody" will want to mess around with when troubleshooting a strange-behaving computer. But if you're a tinkerer, you'll want to give it a try if the symptoms include unpredictable symptoms!
It had been throwing random errors; programs were crashing (intermittently); when he attempted to wipe it and reload the OS (which he had planned to do anyway), it would serve him up a BSOD (blue screen of death) during the install process.
This kind of problem is truly frustrating: there is no internal consistency in the erroring. If the same thing occurs time and again, it provides a clue as to what might be going wrong with your computer (remember my .dll error messages from a previous post? They all related to the same issue: a problem with the .NET framework.). But when strange, unpredictable, unrelated things are happening, it's like the idiots we love to yell at in monster movies: "Don't go in the dark scary basement along, you jerk!!" Or, "He's the killer! He's the killer! Don't trust him!"
That is to say, once you've figured out the problem, you can't believe you couldn't figure out the problem.
The problem in this case was failing memory.
Part of the problem with failing memory is that it doesn't fail all at once. Kind of like a solenoid in a car.
Huh?
When I was a kid we had an old car on which the solenoid was bad.We kept a little hammer in the car, and when it would refuse to start, one of us (usually me) would get out and tap on the solenoid with the hammer. Usually after a tap or two, it started. It was explained to me that there was typically a "bad area" on the solenoid, and if you could just advance it past that bad area, it would do its job properly and the car would start.
Similarly, when RAM is going bad, it doesn't necessarily fail all at once. So it can, when that particular sector of the memory is being accessed, cause strange and unpredictable things to crash, fail to load, or behave strangely.
Eventually, my friend figured out that the problem was bad RAM, replaced it, problem solved.
But what I learned from this was that earlier in the triaging process, when a computer starts acting up, it's worth the few minutes it takes to test the RAM - and it can be done easily with something called MemTest86+, a free utility from http://www.memtest.org.
No, it's not necessarily something "just anybody" will want to mess around with when troubleshooting a strange-behaving computer. But if you're a tinkerer, you'll want to give it a try if the symptoms include unpredictable symptoms!
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