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Old January 31st 04, 01:25 PM
~misfit~
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Ken Fox wrote:
"S.Heenan" wrote in message
news:LgbSb.319487$JQ1.7855@pd7tw1no...
Ken Fox wrote:
Hi,

I've got a Dell C400 laptop with 768MB of RAM, that obviously I
can't overclock. The reason I'm posting this question here is that
I think this ng is about as knowledgeable about Memtest86 as any
other ng.

I've had some blue screen of death (BSOD) problems with the notebook
when trying to use wireless networking cards in the PC card slot;
this is a not uncommon problem from what I can tell, reading various
Dell forums and other ng postings. I believe it is software
related.

Anyway, I spent yet another 45 mins on the phone with Dell laptop
tech support yesterday, speaking to a fellow who was obviously
pretty knowledgeable about computers (much moreso than your usual
telephone support person; he sounded like a computer nerd).
Anyway, he told me that the only other thing he could think of to
do that I hadn't done was to remove the one removeable Sodimm from
the notebook and see if the problems are eliminated.

That makes sense, however I've run 3 or 4 passes of Memtest86 on the
laptop and not had any errors; my sense is that (1) it is very
unlikely that Memtest86 would miss a memory error; (2) if there are
memory errors, there are 3 possible sources, e.g. 2 sticks of ram
only one of which is user removable plus the cpu which is also not
user accessible, and (3) given #1 and #2, we are talking about such
a very small possible yield that it isn't worth doing, e.g. removing
the memory module as a test procedure. Alternatively, I guess I
could run another memory testing utility but I question if there is
one out there that is any better than Memtest86.



After booting into Memtest, press "c" "2" "3" and "Enter" to do all
tests. Test #11 is very thorough. Some will say GoldMem 5.07 is
better. http://www.goldmemory.cz/



thanks so much for this response; after 5 hours we haven't quite
gotten to test#11 (we're at 10), but obviously it is testing
something and if it comes back with no errors I have little reason to
question the RAM.


Just a thought, laptops are quite different to desktops, maybe the extra RAM
module competes for resources with the PC card slot? Or uses power from the
same PCB trace or something? There may be a reason the tech suggested you
remove it. It shouldn't take long, then you'd know if it was going to make a
difference, you can always put it back in.
--
~misfit~