Mike Leone on 30 Dec 2009 07:06:54 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] How To Diagnose System Instability?


Casey Bralla had this to say:
> Lately my computer has started showing signs of instability.   I get rather 
> frequent SegFaults which pop up windows in KDE and (usually) allow me to 
> restart applications.  The computer is about 8 months old, and had been 
> completely fine up until about a month ago.
> 
> At first I thought this was just goofiness with the latest version of KDE, but 
> after I removed half my RAM, the stability improved tremendously.   Also, my 
> BIOS includes the memtest86+ program and it shows errors (sometimes).
> 
> I use Gentoo, so am compiling a lot of software.  I've read that recompiling 
> the kernel is a great way to identify hardware problems since it exercises the 
> whole system so thoroughly. <sigh>
> 
> So I'm struggling to identify which component(s) of my system are causing the 
> instability.   Here are the things I've tried, with very limited success:
> 
>  - run memtest86+.  (Sometimes shows errors, but sometimes can run overnight 
> without any problems)
>  - Removed half the 4 memory chips. [I had 8 GBytes, so could spare the RAM] 
> (This helped, but not 100%)


Sure sounds like the RAM is your problem.

So throw out that RAM, and buy all new. It's cheap, and less frustrating.

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