bad memory or bad board?

[ghof45]

Last week I got blue screen errors and system basically died. HP sent recovery disks that would error at 70%. Did a Windows diagnostic and got errors after about 40% thru the memory diag but I still thought it was OS corruption so I tried to downloaded windows 7 again -- that stopped with an error after about 30 min.

Now about 2 hours or so into the MemTest86. and the Red Error indicator is already at 96721. HP system is 2 years old has A10 chip and 10gb of ram 4/2/4 config.

When this is over should I try each module separately to ferret out the bad one(s). Or do you think it's the motherboard?
Thanks for the help.

[David (PassMark)]

You should initially assume it is the RAM & test 1 stick at a time.

You don't need to get 96,721 errors to know it is bad. As soon as you have even a few errors you know it is bad

[ghof45]

I never ran this before so - a bit new at it. Well I stopped a little while ago. Tons of errors and now doing the first mod -- it's 4gig and so far no errors. After this I'll put in the 2gig. Can't remember the last time I had ram go bad on me. This forum has been very helpful. I'll let you know how it goes.

[ghof45]

Still no errors. I think this stick is good so will stop the test and put in the 3rd one. I thought this was something like the hard disk tests we did years ago. You got some bad sectors, isolated them and kept on going.

[David (PassMark)]

There are facilities in some operating systems to flag certain memory addresses as bad and not to be used. But the information isn't recorded into the RAM sticks themselves. Plus you might still get the BIOS using the bad addresses, because it doesn't know any better. So in 99.9% of cases you are better off replacing bad RAM with new RAM. (The trick of course is to make sure it is the RAM that is bad and not the CPU, Motherboard or RAM slot).

[ghof45]

Well, good news, both #2 and #3 ram sticks are good. I was able to reload the HP recovery disks and they worked. So I'm back to normal but need to reload some software and files that I backed up before this fiasco with HP (they were almost no help at all- they wanted me to send them the computer to be fixed for $229 - discounted from original quote of $299). Now I just need to buy some memory. Thanks for your help.

[David (PassMark)]

Glad you were able to sort it out.