Memory tester software roundup
I recently got 2 sticks of 1GB memory for my system so the first thing I did was test it using some free memory testing software. I'm too paranoid, so I didn't want to rely on a single app, so I tried the following:
- Windows Memory Diagnostic

Direct from Microsoft's Online Crash Analysis team. My guess is that these guys spend all day long looking at uploaded Watson blue-screen dumps and they've figured out "patterns" in crashes due to flaky memory. - Memtest86

Popular GPL memory testing software. One cool feature is that it'll tell you whether your memory is running in Dual Channel, whether PAT is enabled, etc. Though the screen-shot above doesn't show that probably because the screen-shot is from a virtual machine. - Memtest86+

An updated version of memtest86 by more contributors. - DocMemory
Years ago I used this software to detect some bad memory. I tried it again and it didn't seem to work right anymore (i.e. bizarre errors that didn't seem to be related to my memory). In fact, it even gave errors in a virtual machine.
1 Comments:
Great article! I did not know about the MS memory diag tool. "Diagnostic" is a much abused term. Check out http://www.nicholasditoro.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/7-What-in-the-World-Are-Hardware-Diagnostics.html
for more info. Thanks.
By
NicholasDiToro, at 9:41 AM
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