Blog
Hardware
Date: 24/2/2006
Ok, so the PC boots but the ongoing saga of stability took a new turn last night. In fit of morbid curiosity I pulled one of the memory sticks out of the machine, bringing it down to 256mb and did the usual video encode stress test overnight. It ran fine. And was still working in the morning. Currently the stock cooler fan is running about 3100rpm, the CPU is underclocked to 1.2ghz instead of 1.4ghz and it's voltage is stock. It ran at about 50 to 51° under load all night (12 hours straight).

I think the booting thing might have been related to having the fan speed set too low. Seems ok now.

So I have one suspect memory stick. Great. I'll swap in the other one and run it all again tonight and see what happens. Hopefully it'll fail quickly and I can ditch the bad ram and move on. I've bid on a few name brand sticks on ebay... I have 3 slots anyway so I may as well use them. 512mb is starting to feel cramped on XP anyway.

Update: Last night, back @ 1.4ghz again and the machine reset itself, and then this morning @ 1.33ghz the encode completed. So something is not happy at full speed. Maybe memory timing, the CL??? settings... hmmm I don't know. I guess I'll keep getting more sample points.

Update2: I ran memtest86 with both sticks in and it errored out. So I pulled the motherboard manual and read the section on RAM. Turns out that slot "1" is the furthest from the CPU instead of the closest. Duh. So I moved the sticks into slots 1 and 2 instead of 2 and 3 and reset the timing to the correct default. And reran memtest86 at 1.2ghz overnight. No errors. Then the next night at 1.4ghz, no errors. Riiiight finally. Then last night it froze while printing. *bash head against wall*
Comments:
SnappyCrunch
25/02/2006 12:31am
Sad, isn't it? I know it's the inexorable progress of things, but I thought 256MB would be a comfortable amount of RAM until Vista. Now 512 is feeling cramped on my system, and I always go with the low footprint programs.
 
Reply
From:
Email (optional): (Will be HTML encoded to evade harvesting)
Message:
 
Remember username and/or email in a cookie.
Notify me of new posts in this thread via email.
BBcode:
[q]text[/q]
[url=link]description[/url]
[img]url_to_image[/img]
[pre]some_code[/pre]
[b]bold_text[/b]