I think I mentioned a while back but if not I loaded Vista Ultimate on my 17″ HP laptop shortly after Vista went RTM. Well I was getting a non-occasional opportunity 🙂 to experience the exciting “Blue Screen of Death” (BSD) with no common cause, it was all over the map. When I ran the laptop on the XP or Windows Server 2003 I had absolutely no issues.
I had read multiple times that Vista was sensitive to the quality of the RAM being used but I had run the memory test that is built into the Vista Boot Screen multiple times and it never detected an issue. Never. However, if you recall, when I first bought the memory for the laptop I had an issue with putting 2GB in it, if it all went in, the system wouldn’t boot, but if I used one or the other chip and the 512MB that came with it it was fine. So I already had kind of a hint that the memory I had bought was less than optimal. Certainly it wasn’t the approx $800 per GB chips that HP wanted to sell me (which I would NEVER buy – that is ridiculous pricing HP, fix it) but I didn’t think the memory was too bad when I bought it last summer – just no name.
Well after the BSDs I finally decided to take a shot and buy some newer name brand RAM and see how that went. I found some Crucial brand memory on NewEgg for only $100 a GB so bought a couple of chips (along with a couple more 500GB Western Digital SATA drives for the Media Center because they were only $130 each) . I received the shipment from NewEgg in three days (I love NewEgg) and inserted the RAM and “cheer!” the laptop immediately saw all 2GB and in constant running of several heavy duty programs over the last few days I haven’t had the opportunity to experience a BSD since. Certainly I would have hit a BSD before now with the older RAM in it…
So if you are hitting random BSDs and even if the RAM test is saying RAM is ok, still consider changing out the RAM for some better RAM.
joe
Crikey thats very interesting stuff. I have my laptop sent to MS at the moment since it was BSODing when I had 2 x 1GB modules and a 512MB module. All were Corsair Value Select chips PC3200. The only difference (other than capacity) was that the 512MB module was CAS3 while the 1GBs were CAS2.5. The linux livecd (ubuntu) boots fine and is completely stable. memtest86+ says everything is OK but it did fail a couple of times on one test. Someone said as they were too few and far between to ignore it. Vista just wont boot with it.
I dont think the memory modules have issues as I was using 2 x 512MB and a 1GB module. I then changed to use 2 x 1GB and a 512MB with no luck. At first it was BSODing but now it just hangs. I’ve done all the BIOS updates to no avail.
Lets see what MS says. I will consider your recommendation . I just dont want to waste the modules I have.
I dont know why I said laptop. Probably cos u did 😉
I meant desktop. Updating for accuracy.