Aside from a dead hard drive a year and a half ago, my Dell Inspiron 8200 has been running rock solid sine I bought it five and a half years ago. Now that I'm beginning to use it much more outside of work and rely on it, it decides to get temperamental with me by freezing hard on me. About 20 minutes after booting up, the machine will just lock up, no response to anything, including pings. I have to power it off, and remove and re-seat the memory before it will boot up properly for me. This leads me to believe that I either have a DIMM or a memory slot going bad, but I'm not sure which one. Do I spend the $50 for new memory from Kahlon and hope it's not the slot? How can I tell which it is?
I have a feeling this will expedite my purchase of a new computer, which I am now leaning towards a MacBook Pro and either turning my current laptop into the new house machine or picking up a cheap $500 Dell or something similar.
UPDATE: 01/08/07 12:50PM
My computer locked up on me again, so I took the opportunity to run Memtst86 on it. Turns out, I have some bad RAM. I have a 256 and a 128 chip in their, and of course, the 256 is bad. I'm now running with just 128MB. I'll let it run for a few days to see if I still have lock up issues, but if not, I'll order new memory for the machine.
When I had trouble like this in my inspiron, I think I experimented with swapping the chips, then eventually dropping back to just one chip at a time in alternating slots until I identified the second DIMM slot to be the bad one.
Posted by: john at January 8, 2007 09:35 AMI had to go an open my mouth about it only crashing once a day. It just died on me again. Time to run Memtest86.
Posted by: Doug at January 8, 2007 12:06 PM