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- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!pitt.edu!karol
- From: karol+@pitt.edu (Filip M. Gieszczykiewicz (fmgst@unix.cis.pitt.edu))
- Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
- Subject: Unexplained crashes - possible cause
- Summary: in my case anyways
- Message-ID: <4877@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP>
- Date: 18 Aug 92 05:43:59 GMT
- Sender: news+@pitt.edu
- Followup-To: comp.os.linux
- Organization: University of Pittsburgh
- Lines: 51
-
-
- DO NOT REPLY. BORROWING ACCOUNT. REPLY TO fmgst+@pitt.edu. THANKS
-
- Greetings. I'm new to Linux (in fact, today was the first time I
- got the boot & root disks to work... WOW! :-) but have a possible
- solution to some peoples' problems.
-
- A few years back I got a 80486/25 with 8 megs of ram, a 200MB
- IDE, and a ProDesigner II VGA board and monitor. All was dandy
- except that MS-Windows 3.0 would *reboot* my machine once in a
- while. Support had no idea what the heck was wrong - and they
- had the pleasure of playing with my motherboard twice :-) and
- they finally sent me a new motherboard (but put the old RAM from
- the original: hint-hint).
-
- Well, I just stayed away from Windows utill I got 3.1. Just
- after the installation I got the message I was waiting for -
- "Partity error. System Halted" At least I now knew what the
- hell was going on. After fooling with the 8 SIMMs I found one
- that would crash Windows:
-
- My test consisted of running 16 tasks of "Shaker" which
- comes with MicroSoft C SDK and "shakes" memory around
- to see if your program uses malloc() or the new one
- that you're supposed to use - basicly ABUSES all the
- RAM in the system.
-
- Well, it turned out to be one darn 1MB SIMM that was the
- problem. Again, the problem ONLY and I mean ONLY showed up
- in Windows - not even extended memory testers or other system
- "burn-in" programs (like CPU24.ZIP on 135.252.135.4)
-
- Is your Linux crashing NOW-AND-THEN? Is your MS-WINDOWS also
- crashing now-and-then? CHECK THAT RAM!!!
-
- By the way, after pulling the "offending" SIMM, I noticed that
- it's the "old" 9 chip design. I'm not sure it it's just shoddy
- assembly (probably, since the contacts are only tinned not gold-
- plated) but some of the chips were DARN close to each other - the
- spacing was not even. Some leads ALMOST touched at room-temp and
- I can only wonder what they did after being "shaken".... ;-)
-
- So, next time you're upgrading RAM, get the new 3-chip SIMMs and
- (with the prices being what they are) get faster ones.
-
-
- --
- ________________________________________________________________________________
- ________________________________________________________________________________
- _______________________karol@unix.cis.pitt.edu__________________________________
- ________________________________________________________________________________
-