Bad RAM and Freezing Computers

I think I finally figured out why my Linux system has been acting a bit buggy lately. Bad RAM. Not just a cartoon character thought up by Iambe (who got hitched yesterday!), but now a real life threat. Spending the day coding and having my system just randomly freeze up is a real piss off. I finally installed memtest86 which is a RAM checker. When I rebooted my system it had 600 odd errors at 4 different locations (00019eb8a6c, 00019eb8a64, 0001beb8a6c and 0001beb8a6c), all around the 400mb+ area. I opened her up and took a look and the ram in the third and last DIMM slot was different, old, and only 64 megabytes. I popped it out and restarted the tests. Only 6 minutes or so in and no errors yet. I remember when I started the tests before it seemed like the errors started popping up right away. While I was at it I threw a memtest disk into the windows box (which I’ve decided I will upgrade soon) and started a test on it’s ram, and so far (almost 2 hours in) no errors. I found a spare 64 meg DIMM in my drawer so I think I’ll pop that in and see if it’s good. I might even throw in the old stick just to see if the errors pop up again, and it’s no something else.

Weekend wrap up. Today I worked on the project for the design company a lot, they changed the specs and assumptions I was working on so a bunch of stuff had to be recoded/refactored. Not a huge deal. Yesterday was mostly working for the ASP project, finishing up things, but I had to cut out at a reasonable time to head over to some friends for dinner, which was awsome. I saw JD even get a little drunk… not drunk enough to start singing his favorite song while drunk, but a little tipsy and red in the face anyway, after a couple of glasses of port (which I had some as well, and that’s pretty good stuff).

Mental note: Contact C and find out how to get a cute little stuffed cthulhu.