Finally figured out a reliable way to find corrupted RAM without swapping sticks

We had a client's PC at the office last week that kept crashing randomly in Excel of all places. No blue screens, just freezes. I ran Memtest86 for 8 hours and it passed with zero errors. Was about to blame the SSD when I remembered an old trick a tech showed me 5 years ago. I booted into a Linux live USB, opened up the terminal, and ran the 'stress' tool with the memory test option. It failed in under 3 minutes on one specific memory address. Replaced that single stick and the machine has been stable for 4 days now. Has anyone else found Memtest86 misses stuff that other tools catch?

2 comments

2 Comments

ericjackson2d ago

Yeah, Memtest86 has totally let me down before too (I've had it pass and then Prime95's blend test find errors in like 10 minutes). The Linux stress tool is legit, I've used that exact method to catch bad RAM that Memtest86 swore was fine.

holly_flores792d ago

Is Memtest86 just a big fan of gaslighting us or what? (Makes you wonder if it has some kind of loyalty oath to bad RAM sticks.) I swear, every time I've had a system acting squirrelly, that stupid test passes with flying colors, only for something like Prime95 to call it out in under 15 minutes. It's like the RAM equivalent of a doctor telling you you're fine while you're actively bleeding (but hey, at least the Linux stress tool is the honest one in the room). Gotta love how the freeware stuff often works better than the "industry standard" crap.