Ken Fox wrote:
Hi,

I've got a Dell C400 laptop with 768MB of RAM, that obviously I can't
overclock. The reason I'm posting this question here is that I think
this ng is about as knowledgeable about Memtest86 as any other ng.

I've had some blue screen of death (BSOD) problems with the notebook
when trying to use wireless networking cards in the PC card slot;
this is a not uncommon problem from what I can tell, reading various
Dell forums and other ng postings. I believe it is software related.

Anyway, I spent yet another 45 mins on the phone with Dell laptop tech
support yesterday, speaking to a fellow who was obviously pretty
knowledgeable about computers (much moreso than your usual telephone
support person; he sounded like a computer nerd). Anyway, he told me
that the only other thing he could think of to do that I hadn't done
was to remove the one removeable Sodimm from the notebook and see if
the problems are eliminated.

That makes sense, however I've run 3 or 4 passes of Memtest86 on the
laptop and not had any errors; my sense is that (1) it is very
unlikely that Memtest86 would miss a memory error; (2) if there are
memory errors, there are 3 possible sources, e.g. 2 sticks of ram
only one of which is user removable plus the cpu which is also not
user accessible, and (3) given #1 and #2, we are talking about such a
very small possible yield that it isn't worth doing, e.g. removing
the memory module as a test procedure. Alternatively, I guess I could
run another memory testing utility but I question if there is one out
there that is any better than Memtest86.


After booting into Memtest, press "c" "2" "3" and "Enter" to do all tests.
Test #11 is very thorough. Some will say GoldMem 5.07 is better.
http://www.goldmemory.cz/