bad ram

[ELDoro]

Hey guys, over the summer I upgraded to PQI's 2GB DDR400, 4 sticks of 512. Shortly after I noticed every so often my computer would randomly reboot, so I'm pretty sure its a ram problem. Well up till now I have been really lazy and since the rebooting doesnt happen that often I have yet to sit down and figure what sticks it might be. I was just wondering if anyone has any advice as to the best way to go about finding the bad sticks? Also if I find the bad sticks would it be okay to mix the good ones with some of my old kingston 128MB sticks?

I still wont get around to this until christmas break but want to plan ahead : )

[juppy]

I'd try a memory test program first. Something like memtest86. Use each stick by itself individually in the system and let the program run through several times. When one seems to pass, install one of the others and rerun the test again.

Just a thought here, but it might be a motherboard problem too. I don't know why for sure, but some motherboards don't like having all the memory slots maxxed out (memory in all of them). It's rare, but I have seen it happen that a system will get errors with all the memory slots having memory in them. Check each stick with the memory tester first though before looking into this possibility.

As for mixing it with the Kingston, you'd just have to try it to see if they'll work together. Sometimes different brands of memory don't like to work together and they say to try and get sticks as close to each others properties as possible (brand, size, etc). One more thing, if that Kingston isn't DDR400, your memory will all slow down to run at the speed of the slower stick of Kingston (like if it's DDR333). So if the Kingston is alot slower you might be further ahead leaving it out.

[ELDoro]

thanks, i'll give that a try