The Indefinite Article.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Memtest

Random applications have been crashing periodically on my computer (Safari, Textmate, Mail.app, etc). This prompted me to run the diagnostics (check permissions, check disk, etc) that uncovered the minor hard-drive problem that I posted about yesterday.

This hard-drive problem does not really explain the frequent crashes, however, so I decided to see if my RAM was ok. I found a pretty sweet utility called memtest that runs some tests against available memory. Sure enough it found all sorts of problems with my RAM. I pulled the 1 gig card that I had put in a couple of months ago and ran the tests again. The tests found no problems with the built-in 256.

Perhaps the problem is occurring because the built-in RAM speed is 266mhz and the chip is 333mhz? This seems unlikely because before putting in the gig chip I had a 512 333mhz chip that ran just fine (and runs, I assume, sin problemas in Todd's ibook).

Did I get a bum chip?

Did the bad memory somehow corrupt my hard-drive?

2 Comments:

I think the kind of RAM you are using is probably not optimal for your computer, meaning that it may work with some but not all uses and computers. When I go over to OWC's website and look up iBook G4 ram, I get a page-full of PC2700 references. When I go over to DealRAM.com, most of the cheap links are for PC2100 RAM, including at least one link to OWC.

Macintouch has interesting speculation on the topic, including the possibility that the iBook G4 doesn't link PC2100 larger than 256 MB.

Also, are you tracking on the iBook with > 1gig RAM Airport issue? I forgot to mention it when we were discussing your Airport issues the other day.

By Adolph, at 11:25 AM
I am confused, should I be using PC2700 or PC2100 ? How does one know which is optimal?

The 1 GIG chip that I suspect is faulty is PC2700 and the 512 I had befroe was PC2700.

By pablo, at 11:42 AM

The Indefinite Article.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Memtest

2 Comments:

Contributors

Previous