If your computer is having persistent stability problems, it may be bad RAM. Now that Windows is a bit more stable than it was back in the bad old days, Microsoft would like to give users a way to point the finger back at their own hardware if their computer is acting up. It released a memory diagnostic utility yesterday.
Boot the CD suse and you have the same tool for RAM diagnotics
something free and useful from microsoft.
/joke/ I bet they stole it /joke/
MS has lots of free things on there site, and most all their stuff is useful.
if Windows Memory Diagnostic reports no errors, it is not proof that your hardware is working correctly.
When will they stand behind their products?
http://www.memtest86.com
x86 class ram checker has been around for years. But unlike in Microsoft Windows, it’s possible to map around bad memory bits in RAM with the Linux kernel, a simple patch, and the results from the above memory tester. Works like a charm.
This is the one Suse uses, btw.
mark: name one diagnostic tool that WILL prove 100% if you have bad hardware or show me one tool that will stand behind their tool, I am 100% sure you will NOT find one… I suggest pulling your head out from betwen your legs and try to understand the complexaties of hardware daignostics before you make foolish and uninformed posts.
Somewhat useful I guess. But am looking forward to a “You-have-a-shitty-PSU” diagnostic.
When using dual channel memory bus on my nforce2 mobo, gcc (and other things) would randomly segfault. I left memtest86 3.0 (from a gentoo CD) going overnight and it didn’t return anything.
It would be nice to have a somewhat reproduceable way of causing this error so I can go back to the place I bought the hardware from and show them.
say to AOL man, it’s worse than crack.
Did I stumble into Slashdot?
Time to start a subscription service here and remove the 2yos with the ‘My First Learning’ keyboards.
god. when will some of you wake up. please leave your trolling out of osnews.com and go over to slashdot or somewhere where microsoft bashing is acceptable, this site isnt pro microsoft, pro linux, pro bsd or even pro beos;) didnt your mother ever tell you “if you can’t say something nice. dont say any thing at all”
I will not post here again until the damn trolls are expelled.
Hmmm, when I tried to install this it brought me an EULA, with the very first string as follows:
Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic (BETA)
Perhaps we have to wait until it become FINAL?
Moderation please! Adam?
Typical M$. No Office, IE, WMP, and now no hardware diagnostic tool for Linux. (probably a great thing)
How does this help my dual-booted Debian and Gentoo boxen? M$ is always for the profit, and never caring about software quality. When the U.N. mandates all governments use open source in a few years, then it won’t matter…
$CO bankrupted first, M$ second.
This is rather test for Windows compatibility than for abstract “memory quality”
Microsoft got his total absolute winthanks to ability of its OS to work on widest range of all that XT/AT-compatible clones, accomplishing main OS goal – separating user and applications from hardware level.
With “maturing” Windows theu made OS which isn’t so universal in given sence – letting Linux etc to fill niche of low-cost hardware.
With current trend, i’m afraid (or glad?) we’ll get soon situation when Windows works properly only on dedicated/sertificated/high-quality software, in (almost) same price scale as Apple and Sun hardware.
But it need to be explicit – there must be full h/w quality-compatibility tests both on installation CD and as free download.
Hope it helps h/w progress, forcing hardware makers to produce something with better QA both in process of development and manufacturing.
This is not a Windows or Linux tool. In fact, it’s probably one of the only pieces of software Microsoft have produced that will never run on Windows.
As you have to adress memory directly to check it, you cannot run a protected mode OS at the same time, hence the boot floppy/CD.
… in any project where an organization builds custom hardware, problems tend to cause the software and hardware guys to point fingers at each other whenever problems arise… It’s amazing that Windows has finally gotten to the point where they can start pointing fingers at the hardware guys.
Hey did anyone else notice that the new tool is dubbed WMD! Does this mean that Microsoft is now officially a part of the Axis of Evil and will be put on Bush’s shit list? He He He…all in good humor!
Now I can check out RAM for free!!!
Bad/Mismatched RAM was the cause of many hours of frustration during my last upgrade.
stop using $ instead of S. that kinda crap sucks all credibility out of the OSS community. grow up!
From the page…
“… To run Windows Memory Diagnostic, you must reboot your computer …
It is just a standard procedure for a low level diagnostic tool, but I found this sentence somehow amusing. Maybe I’m cynic. Should this rather be said something like, “change the BIOS setting of your computer so that it will boot into CD-Rom/Floppy drive …blah blah blah?” The person who wrote this instruction must have written the very same phrase in the past. I’m curious to know how many “you must reboot your computer”s are there in help pages on http://www.microsoft.com altogether.
Anyhow, where on the earth could this utility be positioned in the overall MS business strategy? This thing won’t lock customers in with MS products in any way. Did Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer all of sudden became ambitious of supporting 3rd party hardware? Or is this purely another PR effort to claim improvement in Windows’ memory handling?
I think what they (we) really need is MS security hole detector and MS buffer overflow detection utility, if there are any such thing. I know that Dept. of Homeland Security will be psyched to use them.
What took Microsoft so long? Sun equipment has had OpenBoot PROM diagnositics for well over a decade, and Solaris has had VTS software-based diagnostics for a very long time. It is widely known that hardware can be the cause of problems, and the responsible vendors out there give their customers the tools to find them!
For everyone still considering migrations to Windows, remember that Microsoft is still ten years behind their competition in many respects (Microsoft’s marketing departent is first rate USDA Grade A choice pork, unfortunately).
Here we see another example of why myself and others who frequent this site question how the moderators base their decisions, and potentially why a number of us have not donated more money towards the site.
I won’t rehash previous discussions, but a frequent arguement is that of why person X gets their comments modded down, yet person Y who posts more off-topic information than person X has their comments left alone.
A recent example was in a discussion about Fleecy Moss’s (or whatever his name is) comments about the Amiga… In the forum for this discussion, Mike Bouma had moderated down several very well-written and on-topic posts about the Amiga. Apparently this was done simply because Mike disagreed with the posts. They were not insulting, poorly written, or off-topic, and they met all the requirements of the posting terms/rules.
Conversely, in this thread we see the other side of what sparks these “readers vs. moderator” debates. Here you have several blatantly off-topic posts, in capital letters, and probably written by some 12 year old who thinks he’s “eleet”, and these are left intact in the forum even though they’re offending people to the point wherein they’re stating they won’t post on this site anymore due to such behavior (re: “This site has become a troll ground” by Eu).
There have been way too many other examples of this kind of hit and miss behavior regarding peoples opinions and their posting of them.
I say either do away with all moderation, or start backing up what you’re stating in the terms of the site!
Eugenia’s famous for insulting others and moderating down posts that she doesn’t agree with, all the while breaking many of the posting guidelines herself.
Mike’s exhibited it when there’s been any talk that isn’t 100% pro-Amiga.
And yet crap like “OMG LOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL YOU DIDNT KNOW MS HAD FREE PRODUCTS? YOU MUST HAVE YOUR HEAD IN THE GUTTER ALL THIS TIME !!! LOLOLOLOL” is left intact to annoy readers and clutter the site up.
Come on OSNews… Consistency is the key to a good site.
This hit or miss “personal web page” politics doesn’t cut it. It detracts from the sites professionalism, makes the editors out to be a bunch of egotists, and in the end alienates your readers.
I understand the site’s grown (and to hear it from Eugenia, she’s 100% responsible for this growth), but to maintain the kind of readership you’re gunning for, and to get readers to support your site either via donations or ad-clicking, you’ve gotta practice what you preach.
Either do away with the posting guidelines or start applying them uniformly to all posts, editors included. Anything less is… Amateurish at best.
Yaakov, your IP address….
It was interesting to find that domain name to say the least.
Where did Eugenia go?
Where did Eugenia go?
I think she said she is on vacation now … how sad – the site falls apart when she isn’t here
When the U.N. mandates all governments use open source in a few years, then it won’t matter…
COMEDY GOLD!!!!!!!
BeOS is well loved for many reasons, just because she prefers one OS over another (personally) doesn’t make her a devil. She may be a little prejudicial towards certain things, but at least she attempts at some objectivity (more than most of the fanboys are.) I prefer FreeBSD ans Solaris, does that make me an evil pig-dog?
I really wish there was some moderation. It seems that many persons of questionable intelligence are posting inane messages on these discussion boards. Many of these messages are off topic, pointless, or even out-right abusive.
Anyway, I love free utilities. This seems like a nice tool. This utility can only be good for Microsoft – they offer it as is, make no promises as to its use, and if it does find problems it points to hardware and not software.
Mac OS X keeps getting better and better!
Actually an interesting tool. It has 11 tests, and running against my RAM (1 512 SDRAM, and 2 128 SDRAM), it found 13K+ fails for the tests. Guess its time to get new RAM.
Regarding free: the license agreement for the software is only until october or until the product is sold: whichever is sooner. So it is just beta software that people are allowed to test for MS…
Can say I’m going to try this one, but I have to lean more twords Memtest86, bootable Memorytesting CD…
Helped me locate the crashing on my Redhat box,
…registration will be required to post in the comments area before long. And no, that’s not a complaint – it will hopefully help with the sound-to-noise ratio (hell, even the Battlefront over on Ars Technica is more civil than some of the comments threads I’ve read here recently).
If this was designed to “always” show some error so MS could say “did you try our memory tester?” “Errors huh? well that why your windows install is unstable”
lol
Right.
I guess moderation is quite nescessary if you look at some of the crap people produce here. Although I do not think moderation can make everyone happy.
I bet they have a counter that records how many times scandisk is automatically run, and when you run this utility, it looks at that number, and if it’s unusually high, it reports bad memory. I think everyone running windows has bad memory, in this case
This is kinda boring, but at least on topic.
I’m fixing a new machine here which suddenly reboots for no reason. Everything checks out OK… The machine has been stripped down to essentials, the cpu temp fine, bios settings fine etc.
On a clean Win2K install, I’m getting errors like…
“Application popup: W2KSP4_EN.EXE – Application Error : The instruction at “0x77f8d58b” referenced memory at “0x66f18bd8”. The memory could not be “written”.”
(While unpacking W2KSp4).
So I suspect bad memory.
I give WMD a go. Checks out fine, on both standard and advanced tests for about an hour.
I try memtest86. 8% into the second test [address test, no cache] (about 15 seconds after booting), the machine freezes.
So…. What’s up? Either WMD is so bad it cannot detect severe memory errors, or Memtest86 is flawed (Tried 2.9 and 3.0, and it should flag errors rather than freezing…). As the machine is obviously faulty, I’d suspect WMD of not hammering the memory enough to trigger the fault.
Anyone got any better ideas?
Well, there are plenty of other things that can cause spontaneous problems. I had similiar problems just before my hard drive failed, and when my computer was over heating. Do you have a temperature monitoring program? There are a number of free ones available.
I just put sisoft on there, and the stuff that comes with the mobo for temperature monitoring…
Temp is fine.. 39-41 under load. The computer is brand new, sent to me to fix, so a hd problem is unlikely, but possible I guess.
Ah. Running the sisoft memory benchmark causes instant reboot.
Bios memory timings are conservative.
So I guess WMD is not to be trusted, at least in this instance.
I had very similar problems. Turns out my memory was fine, but it was the motherboard (ABIT AT7) that was fried. It finally gave up the ghost when I put in another two hard drives (raid 0+1). I replaced many other parts before I found this out though. The motherboard was one of the most expensive peices and I didn’t want to admit it was faulty.
Hi,
I build one computer for friend of mine and I got similar problems with WinXP. Actually – I got random reboots when copying from CD-ROM to hd – files were corrupted, even small ones and copying of large ones was interrupted or machine rebooted.
I don’t remember what mb I used, but it was Athlon + VIA KT400 chipset. I don’t know if there is any bug in VIA regarding IDE transfers, but no driver update helped (VIA 4in1). Problem was NOT solved till I moved Toshiba DVD/CD-Burner-in-1 onto the same IDE port that HD uses. Then suddenly no other reboot happened till today – 4 months.
On my at-my-work setup, I had similar problem when Plextor CD burner and Toshiba DVD player were on one capble. My W2K disconnected me randomly from network drives and I found out it happens after I did some burning. So I moved DVD player onto IDE 1 along to HD and no other such problem since that change.
I wonder if there is problem with VIA’s IDE chipsets or what?
Sorry for beign off-topic, just tried to be helpfull to problems which were screwing me too 😉
Cheers,
-pekr-