What happened while I was asleep?

[Robert N. Eaton]

Alan Dayley wrote:

> Test your memory.  I had bad RAM in a system a couple of years ago.  It
> manifested as weird problems and hangs and then difficulty booting, etc.
>  The biggest headache of the adventure was the slow corruption of the
> hard drive file system resulting in the loss of some data.
> 
> Because Linux actually makes full use of your systems resources, it uses
> all you RAM and expects RAM to perform correctly.  Windows is far more
> "quietly tolerant" of RAM errors even though the RAM will continue to
> corrupt things under that OS too.  At least that has been my experience.
> 
> Boot a Linux install CD and choose the memory test option.  Let it run
> at least a full pass.  Any error at all can be a problem for the OS and
> you should remove the offending module to run with less RAM or replace it.
> 
> Alan

Uuummm, and if one doesn't have the memtest option? In the past two 
weeks I've tried to install Xandros twice, Fedora Core 6 twice, Kubuntu 
twice, and Fedora 7 once (and upgraded once.) I didn't see a memory test 
mentioned.  ????

Bob Eaton