bad ram?

[hiiden]

I'm trying to figure out what broke. I've been using G3 without any problems for months now, and today the system started freaking out. First, I had a bunch of pops and clicks so I restarted. After restarting, nothing could load, I rebuilt the quicksound database and it found nothing on the hard drive. It's a firewire drive, so I moved it to my other system and the drive worked fine. Since giga was freaking out, I uninstalled it...following the complete uninstall guide on tascam's site. Now, i can load a few things but the memory limit is really low. Every time I try to load, it's stuck at 25% when I used to get 60%. When I run the memory test in the giga configuration manager it says I can use 68%. I'm running WinXP SP2 with 2gig ram on an abit IT7 mobo. Anyone have any suggestions? My guess is that one of the ram chips is bad.

[DPDAN]

If I was in your predicament, I would remove one RAM stick at a time and see what happens.

dpDan

[hiiden]

ok, i just tried two chips that work fine in my other machine. I also tried switching slots around to see if that made a difference...same problem...

[Sam]

Download & run Prime95, select the mixed torture test. This is the best tool I know for accurately determining if all your RAM is perfect.

A less thorough test would be to run 'memtest86'; you can boot this from a floppy or CD and let it run overnight; it's a basic sanity check but can miss imperfections that Prime95 detects. You can also run memtest86 from the boot menu of some Linux live-CD's; Kanotix comes to mind as a linux disk that can do this test (and you don't have to install Linux to do the test).

I would definitely want to confirm the hardware is perfect before I started jimmying hardware & software around. You might be surprised how many imperfect systems there are out there, & I really believe it matters in gigastudio, maybe more than almost any other program.