I hate RAM

General Sun Nov 26, 2006 @ 01:40 Pacific

I finally grabbed some of the parts Wynn was done with in Portland, so I figured I'd make sure they still worked.

Now most of you won't be familiar with the epic saga of my home computers.

Once upon a time, there was Celeron and his equally-as-mediocre-named brother, Pentium. They served me well for a very long time, and I was very happy with them.

Then along came Steph's system, Mister Happy. Mister Happy wasn't happy at all, and eventually got himself nuked and paved into Lobotomy, and he was very happy. Quick, look at the URL bar.

To replace Mister Happy, Steph got Squiggles, and the two were happy together. Well, mostly. Poor Squiggles got mangled badly to and from college.

Eventually Celeron became too old and slow, and it was time to replace him. And thus was born Scorpy.

Meanwhile, Squiggles was transplanted into the shell of what used to be Celeron, and around the same time, the original Lobotomy hardware was retired and replaced with a new system of the same name, still just as happily puttering away.

Next it was time to retire Pentium, and hardware was picked up to match Scorpy's config.. but never worked. It infuriated me to no end, and I ended up RMAing the motherboard, memory, and CPU, but to no avail. It rarely passed a POST, and always flunked out a memtest86. The partial machine was nicknamed Headcase and shoved into the boneyard in the corner, to be forgotten about. He joined Lobotomy 1.0, and CCAPPS, my old desktop machine from Infopop.

I eventually adapted from the dual box setup of Scorpy and Pentium down to just Scorpy. However Scorpy was also growing old, and just last year was replaced with Duo.

Now Scorpy wasn't slow or anything, just not as new as I wanted. As he was perfectly good still, I loaned him to Corwynnde to replace her aging system. She eventually did some hardware swaps -- the fan on the chipset went out, etc.

But Duo was flaky and annoying, and I eventually determined that one of the two sticks of RAM was at fault.

And now that you know all that seemingly useless information, allow me to actually rant about the topic of this post -- I hate RAM.

So I get the motherboard back, and I figured that I'd just put together a system, as I had recently uncovered CCAPPS in the boneyard and knew I could grab things from him if needed.

Wynn also gave me two sticks of RAM that she pulled out of Raukurk's machine. Two sticks that she knew were bad, and that I knew were bad.

So I did the motherboard swap into Headcase, and put in Rauk's RAM. It wouldn't even POST. Beautiful!

So I grabbed the memory that was in the original Headcase motherboard... and, no, it wouldn't POST either. Uhoh.

Desperately, I grabbed the one gig stick from Duo, the one known bad, the one that caused me months of hell when it was living inside of Duo... and it POSTed. And booted. And passed three memtest86 runs.

WTF?

So I stuck a stick of Rauk's memory in, along with the 1 gig stick... and it also passed. So I put the second in, and it also passed. But take out the 1 gig? No POST... in dual channel mode. Passed fine once I switched around the banks.

I'm so confused.

Those are known bad sticks, but they're testing fine. How does that even work? I've put Headcase back in the boneyard for now, as I really need to replace the chipset fan before I do anything else with him. I still trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with him.

Oh, but it gets better. I put the one gig stick here in Lobotomy, and test it... and test it... and it's fine. And I hope it'll continue to be fine, as Lobotomy isn't too happy with only 256 megs of memory.

So I dunno. I have five sticks of 256 meg memory here, all but one of which are "known bad," but all of which work in Headcase or Lobotomy.

And thus ends this evening's random rant.

[Article Link]