[mdlug] One other use for Windows

[Ingles, Raymond]

My main machine is 3 years old, running primarily Ubuntu Linux but also Windows 7 for a few games plus some tools for connecting to work that only seem to run under Windows.

I noticed Windows becoming increasingly unstable over late March, early April. Updates not installing properly, crashing more than usual, etc. Linux, on the other hand, continued to be stable. So I went over Windows carefully, looking for malware and such, but came up empty.

Then Firefox crashed a couple times in Linux. Checked hard drives, no dice. Then, just to eliminate the possibility, I ran Memtest86... and it immediately turned up errors. A little testing determined that one of the four RAM DIMMs had gone bad. I pulled it, and limped along with only 12GB of RAM for a few weeks. (Sheesh, I remember being impressed with a guy who had 1GB in tape backups... get off my lawn, you kids.)

I can say that Patriot Memory honored their 'lifetime' warranty entirely. I filled out the online form saying the memory failed testing, had an RMA within minutes, sent the bad stick in, and - though the shipping was slow - had a new stick, no charge, in a few weeks. Many hours of Memtest86 testing turned up no problems, and the system's been quite stable since.

So, Windows apparently has a use as a 'RAM canary'. You just have to figure out which crashes are crashes, and which are due to bad RAM.