How do I know if I have bad Memory?

[C-Mezak]

Hey all you guys wasting your time arguing about whether or not mac viruses exist! Here's a real question for you!

How do I know if my RAM has gome bad? I have a revC pb, and it feels as if it's slowed down quite a bit in the past few months. What could cause this? I run all of the maintenance scripts regularly. Could it be ram? System Profiler certainly believes that it has a 512 stick in there, and when I run top, it looks as if it's making use of it . . . but there are many pageouts!! Whats the deal, fellas?

Thanks
charlee

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Hey all you guys wasting your time arguing about whether or not mac viruses exist! Here's a real question for you!

How do I know if my RAM has gome bad? I have a revC pb, and it feels as if it's slowed down quite a bit in the past few months. What could cause this? I run all of the maintenance scripts regularly. Could it be ram? System Profiler certainly believes that it has a 512 stick in there, and when I run top, it looks as if it's making use of it . . . but there are many pageouts!! Whats the deal, fellas?

Thanks
charlee

If you want to test your hardware, just run the Apple Hardware Test CD that came with your Mac. You'll need to boot from it to do anything useful with it.

 

[timnosenzo]

My bad RAM was causing kernel panics on startup. Firmware tests confirmed that it was a bad DIMM.

 

[Doctor Q]

I bought a Mac from a catalog reseller, with their "free" (for price of installation) add-in RAM. My system crashed now and then, particular on complicated web pages, so I thought it was Safari's fault at first. Turned out to be bad RAM, which the hardware test confirmed. The reason it tended to crash on complicated web pages is that the bad RAM happened to be used for the high addresses, and I simply wasn't using all of my RAM until Safari did a little extra work.

 

[Norouzi]

There are a couple of really good ways to tell if you have bad RAM:

1. If you start up you Mac and hear the sound of breaking glass instead of the normal startup sound it means bad or no RAM.

2. Run the Apple Hardware Test CD that came with your machine and run the extended RAM tests (this can take a very long time if you have alot of RAM)

3. If you suspect bad RAM is the cause of a problem that you can duplicate ex. every time you launch photoshop the machine crashes, or you get alot of Kernal panics. Remove additional RAM modules one at a time and start up the machine again. If you remove one and you no longer are able to duplicate the original problem you've found your bad module.

 

[JOD8FY]

It doesn't sound like a RAM issue. Try zapping the PRAM, repairing permissions or backing up files and reinstalling the OS. Of course, I've heard that if you create a new Admin. Account and delete your current one, it does just as good as reinstalling the OS.

JOD8FY

 

[Dr. Dastardly]

Can you remember what you just posted without scrolling back up to see? If not you have bad memory!

I crack myself up!