On Tuesday 22 March 2005 23:59, Michael James wrote:
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 01:17 am, Fergus Wilde wrote:
On Tuesday 22 March 2005 13:07, steve wrote:
How long should an athlon 1800 take to complete the memory test? Can I assume from this that my memory is bad?
Did it show any errors? If not, then no, it doesn't mean anything bad that it ran for hours. Usually if there are egregious problems with the memory they will show themselves relatively quickly, but memtest writes a whole bunch of patterns to the memory to test it. The whole thing could go on exhaustively for ages. But I must say if I had an error free 4 hour run I would give up and assume the memory is OK unless you have unexplained crashes or other reasons to believe it's bad.
Exactly. If you just want to see if a second hand stick of ram is any good, a run of a few hours should settle it. No errors listed below the bar = good.
_IF_ you are having crashes, memtest is a good first test. If a run of a few days doesn't produce anything, then it's probably safe to rule out memory errors and look elsewhere for the problem. (Don't forget the power supply)
I once had a memory error so subtle I could run memtest all weekend and only get 1 glitch. It was giving me a couple of crashes a week though and each crash left files that hung any process that read them. You can imagine how unusable my desktop got once there were a few of these pitfalls around. Replacement RAM and fsck.reiserfs --fix-fixable cured it.
FWIW, michaelj
Hi. No. It's in conjuction with the other thread on the list at the moment entitled, 'Re: [SLE] internal compiler error (second attempt)'. As I'm not allowed to ask multiple questions I had to break it into these two items. Sorry. THanks for your reply. Steve.