RAM Testing

[MUKid]

The short version: I need a good bit of freeware that will let me check a stick of RAM to see if it's causing some errors.

The long version: I'm trying to get my old crappy computer up and running for the kids. One day it just started rebooting every time WinXP tried to start up. Suspecting a corrupted install, I tried reinstalling it and it worked fine for a while. Then one day the same problem started happening again. So then I thought it might be the hard drive. I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled again, but got some random errors during the install, so I figured the hard drive was blown and plugged in a different hard drive and tried yet again. More errors on the second hard drive as well.

So I've pretty much ruled out the hard drive, and along the way I also stuck in a new CPU, so that's out, too. My next step is that maybe I've got a bad stick of RAM. I'm going to pull one of the sticks and try to run it for a while and see what happens, and if it crashes, pull the second and replace the first and try again. But in the meantime I thought I'd see if the RAM was bad by running some kind of test on it. I know such a thing exists but can't find anything good. Suggestions?

 

[arigo]

Do a google search for memtest86

 

[MUKid]

Excellent - I saw this when I Googled for RAM tests, but wasn't sure it was what I wanted. I'll give it a try.

 

[MUKid]

So it turns out it was the RAM, but I didn't need to run the diagnostic to figure it out. While trying to install SP1, the system crashed, and kept rebooting immediately on entering Windows. I pulled one of the two memory sticks and the system wouldn't boot at all. I took that one out and put the first one back in and everything ran fine. Unfortunately the one that works is only 128 MB... yeesh.

Thanks again for the link, arigo.