Re: memories

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

I wrote:

|> Until recently I had just 32MB of RAM. I added 64 more on
|> Saturday. Everything seemed fine to begin with---the 96MB was
|> detected in BIOS and by the kernel; I had much less disk-thrashing
|> in long Netscape sessions and so on. But ....
|> 
|> If I leave the machine up overnight when I log on again in the
|> morning, I get constant segmentation faults (especially in
|> resource-heavy applications like emacs, TeX, X ...)  and sometimes
|> a kernel-panic. Rebooting `fixes' the problem.

I'm responding to my own message in case the information might be
useful to others who could face similar problems. The difficulties
were caused, as a number of people suggested, by a corrupt memory
module.  The memory problem was not detected in BIOS nor by the
memtest program that is in the package `sysutils' (it reported `no
errors'). However, massive problems were detected and reported by the
memtest-86 program which is part of the hwtools package.

I highly recommend this program. You copy it to a floppy and boot from
that floppy. It then does a (very!) lengthy and detailed check of
every nook and cranny of your memory modules. No home should be
without one,

Jim