Two and a half weeks ago, my laptop decided to start locking up on me. Turns out, one of the memory chips was testing bad and causing the lockups. I've now been limping along for the past two and a half weeks on 128MB of RAM, and I mean limping! The laptop has been running fine, with the 128 MB chip in the second slot. Looks like the issues were definitely related to a bad memory chip. I'll be purchasing a replacement 512MB chip in the near future.
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.