Yes - I did that earlier. Based on that procedure I figured two of my sticks were faulty. I then went ahead and loaded XP with the one stick of 256 meg (had three 256'rs). Then I had a friend check the two faulty ones and he found they checked good on a device he has that takes a long time to check each stick (he is in the computer fixing business). He reported back that they both checked good. But that is only half the story.
All this began when a successful load of XP with the three sticks installed crashed the following day completely. No blue screen, no video at all, nothing. That began a long tirade that included a complete cleaning of my HD using IBM's disk management tools, including removing and replacing the drive boot sector. Attempting to revert to WINme when it appeared xp flat wasn't going to work, and having that fail. And finally after the ram manuevers getting a successful load of XP, which, believe it or not, crashed again before that day was over. Again, running on the one apparently good stick, I couldn't repair or reload XP. I kept getting the error during setup that it couldn't find a file on the CD. Fortunately, I had purchased two XP programs (both OEM), one for my computer and one for my wife's computer. As a final effort I decided to try to load her Disc, and joila! XP loaded in a heart beat and has been working like a genuine champ ever since (except for loading all files to Drive "E" instead of "C", that is making my single HD drive "E"). I'm not going to bother changing it. It gave a little problem downloading new scanner drivers from Canon as the program was written to extract to C:\Temp, which of course didn't work as drive "C" is a zip drive. But used WINZIP to extract it to "E" and everything is hunky dory. I also think I have the same problem updating soundblaster audigy files. It works on the native XP drivers but I lose it completely after trying to install the updated XP drivers from Creative. I guess the whole world assumes that Drive "C" is the center of the universe.