Hey everybody I've been messing around with some old'ish RAM today donated earlier in the week to the “Educate Tech 1709 “ charity and i've been testing it out on my machine at home which currently runs with a single ( don't laugh ) 256M DDR 333 DIMM. The condition of the sticks I got were unknown however they all came bundled into a single ESD bag so i was guessing my luck wasn't gunna be good. Basically my question is, how do you know if RAM is bad? I know this has an obvious answer such as “ it doesn't work dumbass!!!” , however today has given me some strange results. Some of the sticks just didn't register in BIOS, others partly did ( eg. 13M from a 512M stick ) others showed up fine, but when it came to boot time the machine was having none of it! Before you ask i tried two independent (Linux) OSs All sticks are now removed and the system works fine but is the definitive proof of bad RAM simply that the OS won't boot?
Try running them using [google]memtest86[/google]. Once you've ruled out incompatible motherboard-ram combination, then you can assume the RAM is dead.
memtest86 is free, it just the above site is charging for cd-rom and delivery I think. Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool
