[clue-tech] Bleepin' Memory

[Keith Hellman]

Hello all:

I'm looking for some advice on the next-best-step in a hardware
diagnosis.

A little more than a year ago I bought a Gigabyte 865PE motherboard, a
P4, and a 512MB DDR ram for a new machine.  It has in general performed
well.  Of particular annoyance, however, was that I was never able to
successfully backup to my DVDRAM drive.  Kept getting corrupt BZIP files
that I could not fully decompress.  Oh well, I thought, my drive is
going on the fritz (it is by now several years old) and I adopted other
backup solutions.

A couple weeks back I'm backing up and bzip segfaults.  Amazingly, it
regurgitates a message saying (paraphrased)
  This is not a bzip bug.  You probably have subtle memory corruption
  which other programs may ignore (or not even notice) but bzip is
  sensitive to minor bit twiddles - so we crash.

  We repeat - this is not a bzip bug.  Go fix your memory.

I have to admit I was pretty astounded.  It so happens that about the
same time I was doing some big GIMP work & I had noticed the GIMP
crashing occasionally, which certainly is *not* what I'm used to.

So.  I whip out the ol' memtest86+ program (http://www.memtest86.com)
and after an hour or so it started to find errors.  I chide myself that
this is what I get for skimping and buying non-kensington memory, order
myself a new (Kensington this time) module, and wait.

The memory arrived the other day, I slap it in, figure I'll run
memtest86+ again just for giggles and, you guessed it, memmory errors
again.

The specific tests that are failing are #3 (about 25% of the time), #4
(about 75% of the time), and 1 #2 failure out of the 60 errors.  Details
of these tests are at
  http://www.memtest86.com/#details
it seems I have confirmed 'subtle & data sensitive errors'.  I would
also point out that memtest86+ can go through multiple passes *without*
any errors and that the memory location reported is inconsistent.  My
fear is that I have a flaky mobo or p4 cache and this is why I pose
these questions to the group:
- has anyone experienced a similar problem with memory?
- ... and if so how did you determine the culprit?

I don't like the idea of having to start swapping out either the
processor or the mobo (particularly since I have neither the spares or
the free time...)
- is there a store that could thoroughly test the p4?
- the mobo?
- what type of cost am I looking at?  
- can anyone recommend a particular place?

Thanks in advance for everyone's help.

-- 
Keith Hellman                             #include <disclaimer.h>
khellman at mcprogramming.com                from disclaimer import standard
public key @ www.mcprogramming.com

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy
me."

-- Noel Coward
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