Broken part of ram -- 100% broken?

[Alexander Toresson <alexander.toresson@gmail.com>]

My brother has an old computer, a Compaq Presario, which he is running
windows 98 on. He's not running any game on it, and win98 is really
unstable on it, so I've manage to persuade him to make me install
debian on it. However, just to check, I ran memtest86 on it, to check
the ram. Result: lots of errors between 14 and 17 mb.
Could linux be setup to not use this area of the ram? Getting new ram
for this computer may not be easy, it's a compaq, so it may need
special compaq ram... dunno if pc100/pc133 would do...

Regards, Alexander Toresson