Unusual & Often Crashes May Be Bad RAM!

[sjoens]

I bought a laptop 4 years ago and quickly upgraded the RAM from 2x4GB  (8 GB) to 2x8 (16 GB).

Aside from the periodical blue screens and program crashes, Sonar & CbB would crash the most.

I recently got smart and ran a RAM test to see why all the crashes. One of the two newer 8 GB chips quickly reported bad in a basic read&write test.

Yesterday I replaced the two 2x8 chips with two 2x16 (32GB) chips. and ran the same test. So far so good!

Only noticeable performance increase in CbB so far is how fast the Themes window opens in Preferences. Used to take many seconds. Now only a few.

Edited August 15, 2020 by sjoens

[msmcleod]

I've had this issue twice.

The first time was actually a bad RAM stick, but the second time was just some dirt or corrosion on the DRAM connectors. WD40 and a cloth sorted it out.

[Tezza]

Yeah, you can get dust in the motherboard slot sometimes, has happened to me a couple of times. I used a camera lens brush and blower to clean out the slot and then wiped the ram stick connections with the guitar rag and then checked everything with a magnifying glass before reseating the ram.

There's probably a professional way to do this but it worked for me.

As a habit, I give it a good clean before installing or switching ram because it can happen after you put new ram in. If you've got a bit of dust in the computer, when you pull the old ram out, dust can fall in and then when you put the new ram in, it just pushes the dust further down, lodging it somewhere it shouldn't be.  The other thing of course is mismatched ram, sticks that aren't the same.

I've never had a ram stick go bad on me but I did damage a slot once (rendering it unuseable). That was when I first got computers and was a bit clumsy with my ram install procedure.

Edited August 16, 2020 by Tezza