Bad RAM; (UPDATE)

UPDATE: There was a note in my mailbox Tuesday when I got home from my trip to the South Coast with Maggi over the weekend. We took an early holiday to go to an NA convention at the Red Lion in Coos Bay and fuck around camping and driving around farther south. We even took the two-rivers tour to Glide but that is another story. Anyway I finally figured out it must be my new RAM back from the mfg and sure enough it was.
It was easy enough to install once I got my nerves to calm down, and for good measure I put the CMOS jumper back where it is supposed to go, which was the hardest thing, I had to look it up slowly and carefully you do not want to put that little fucker on the wrong 2 of the 3 available pins.
It is weird, though, not having any blue-screen crashes at all. I got kind of used to it, I guess.



Eventually I got plenty tired of rebooting from the frequent and inevitably inconvenient blue screen crashes of my new computer. Pissed me off.
So I started trying to find out why the fuck this brand new $900 machine just would not stay lit.
I learned how to access the event viewer, and what the results mean, and I found a program called blue screen viewer which kind of analyzes the crash dump and summarizes the findings. Crash dump, when the machine crashes it remembers what it was doing at the time so folks who know more than me can go in there and find out why it had to shut itself down. Interestingly, crashing is what it does so it doesn't hurt itself by trying impossible things or doing two things at once or really breaking anything, so it stops working and reports what happened.
Result being that it said the problem wasn't something the user (me)  did, or what the software did, but something in the lizard-brain wasn't adding up. They call it the kernel. Fine.
Blue screen viewer said it probably was a matter of bad memory storage.

The red part of the screen is the record of bad sectors in the memory module. It can run into the thousands of bad ones. I had 42 bad in this pass, while that's not a lot it is far too many. Your rig won't run with any at all.

So I learned another diagnostic, Memtest86, which is a weird program you load onto a DVD and reboot, so the system loads a simple operating program which writes a string of coded numbers into your RAM and then goes  back and reads the numbers in comparison to what it wrote  so you can tell if the memory is storing the right shit and reading the same shit it wrote.
Turns out, yes and no. I have 8 g of RAM, two 4g sticks. I took one out and ran Memtest86 on the other one. Bad. I ran 3 passes, and they all said there were bad sectors the first had 42 bad, the second 65 bad and the third got to a hundred even.
The other stick, to my surprise,  was OK.
G Skill makes a lot of memory devices, including this RAM, and they have a bit of a reputation for spotty quality control. On the upside, they were perfectly fine issuing me a RMA number, so I sent on the bad one and hopeful soon I will have a replacement. This computer runs fine on 4g of RAM but it is kind of weird not ever crashing. I am eager to get the new module in there, though, editing HD video takes lots of RAM so my video projects are all on hold. Pity, because I just got some new software, Sony Vegas Pro, and I'd like to try it out.