03-Mar-2007

Machine death

As you may or may not know, my computers at home crunch for SETI in their spare time. Yesterday, I was investigating why my Linux box was returning strange results. I powered the machine off and vacuumed it out as it was a tad dusty. On powering it back up it was extremely unstable, and would only stay up for minutes before getting kernel panics indicating bad memory.

So I booted up Memtest+, and wouldn't you know it, I was getting lots of memory errors.

As there are two sticks of DDR in the machine, I took them out and tested them one at a time... and both generate errors... in either slot... with failing addresses always ending in the same four hex digits.

The chances of both sticks of DDR having the exact same problem is erm, remote, to say the least. I can only conclude that the motherboard or CPU has a problem.

Looks like it's time for a new machine...

Posted at March 3, 2007 7:53 AM
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