Tools for hardware troubleshoots (RAM)

I used to work in PCs and in over 10 years I never saw a piece of software that could find a fault in memory (and wouldn't believe it if I saw it). We had a very expensive piece of hardware that would test SIMMs and give a yes or no but I was never sure of even that because memory failure is under duress so memory going wrong while software stresses it will not go wrong in a different device.

In our company I would test any customer reported memory in a series of working machines and if I could install an OS and run certain applications I deemed that the memory had been stressed as much as could be and that the memory is 'probably' ok. In my case recently I had a problem that could have been memory, motherboard or drives (SSD) and even though motherboards mostly have more on/off errors, they can also hang just as much as memory so I waited until I could justify upping from 8 to 16GB with the hope that the memory was at fault, and it turns out it was the memory but more by luck than judgement. So you are extremely unlikely to find anything useful from software.

Just boot an ISO with memtest on it, it's the best way to test, nothing else is then using the RAM while you're testing it and can get proper results.

Justin in 10-years and thousands of computers not one failed with a bootable DOS memory test disc that we paid for sorry can't remember the name and not one faulty computer that came back to us failed with the same software. My point is software tests don't find faults with memory.

robgriff444 They can though and are usually the first step I take, the only other option is swapping sticks in and out or swapping in known working memory.

Justin yes, when we had parts around us I would always try swapping memory in and out but at home with very little money that isn't a possibility now. and if a software checker found a fault with memory it would be easily replicable when using the computer because something would go wrong in a repeatable way and that is not the normal way memory fails, ie being stressed by a game or a heat change or something spiking due to static damage a year ago. When you deal with as many computers as I have you quickly realise that the complexity of failure of memory is way beyond what software can deal with.

laky Failing RAM normally causes random freezes, trouble is your mother board could do that and so could your graphics card although less likely so what it really comes down to is 1. what easiest to replace 2. what can you afford to replace and 3. what's the most likely culprit. So let's try the other way what fault have you got?

Google's 'stress app test' runs on linux but isn't in the Solus repos.

I had seen good reports inc from Asus https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?73665-Our-preferred-memory-stress-test but my results were mixed.

My ram is 3200. Windows would run but I got freezes and crashes when browsing. Dropping to 2933 fixed that and ran windows without any problems. I ran stress app test on linux mint for an hour with no errors. In solus, however, I was back to getting problems but this time the whole system would hard lock.

I dropped down to 2666 but haven't used solus much since because of other problems with it.

Problems like this are very infrequently due to cables which typically work or don't but it's worth a try especially if it's cheap. I always found that Windows was more resource hungry than Linux so it will tax your system more but this could mean your system is heating up more and the motherboard doesn't like it so it doesn't point to the RAM, this is the problem with diagnosing PCs they don't make noises like cars so you can't tell where a fault is and any component that fails doesn't have the capacity to tell you that it failed let alone why it failed which is why people use things like oscilloscopes. I've often thought that there would be a market for a little device inside a PC whose responsibility was to monitor everything that the PC was doing and report on it's health but this would lead to less people buying replacement parts and big companies would lose money. My thinking on PCs at home is that if I have a fault that I can't diagnose I simply start to think of upgrading the parts that it could be so I benefit from any attempts at repair and don't really lose out of it fails to fix it.

laky Well, fingers crossed.