Matt Gibson wrote:
On Monday 14 Mar 2005 02:09 am, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Recently I started getting segfaults when compiling. My memory is relatively new so I tried reseating it; the problem disappeared.
Run a few passes of Memtest86 (<http://www.memtest86.com/>) to get some confidence that your memory is free from errors.
Hear hear! I recently bought two 512Mb memory sticks. I bought Kingston first of all, and one of them turned out to be faulty (but I didn't figure it out for a week because it was the second stick, and I didn't fill up half a gig very often!) I had Corsair as a replacement, and and soon as it arrived, I was paranoid enough to run memtest86 on it. That went back to the seller the same day, because I came back to find several hundred errors reported. The replacement I got for that, exactly the same Corsair, is fine.
Either I was extremely unlucky, or memory's getting a lot less reliable these days. And when the usual symptom that anyone gets is that their Windows machine crashes, I wonder how many people are actually noticing?
M
Go into a shop and buy some memory and you'll see just why it's unreliable, the typical "I've never damaged memory" guy will pick it up between 2 fingers and walk across a carpet with it, then stick it in an anti-static or static dissipative bag. In the plant where the memory is made, he'd be fired for doing just that. I've taught Engineers ESD (Elestrostatic Damage) for decades, some of whom were not at first convinced until I showed them under a microscope the sort of moonscape craters ESD make inside chips, how ESD is generated, the effect of materials and the partial damage that will not stop chips from working immediately, but over time will cause intermittents, then solid failures. Management provided me with $10,000.00 US to equip our Engineers, chip manufacturing and test Engineers in Europe with wrist-strap monitors to alert them when they weren't properly grounded as happens when the wrist band is dirty. For the most part guys in PC shops need a suit and tie or tea shirt and beard, but no knowledge of such things, so I have a bunch of bad memory sticks lying around despite the fact that I use large anti-static mats properly grounded (to the mains and buried hamradio grounds) to work on and a wrist strap connected to a (Ground Gard) monitor. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Large Computer Systems Specialist - Retired Hamradio Callsign G3VBV and Keen Private Pilot Aeroplanes, Linux, Computers and Cricket my major passions ===== LINUX USED HERE, A Microsoft-free Computing Environment ====