Odd memtest86 behaviour

[Alex Beamish]

Hi folks,

I've been running memtest86 on a hand-me-down PC and getting strange results.

Originally, it had 512M of RAM and it would fail memtest86 after 13
seconds. I bought an additional 1G today, installed it (1G first slot,
512M second slot), ran memtest86 and it failed after about 43 seconds.

Thinking I'd isolated the problem (or symptom) to the 512M RAM, I took
that out and ran memtest86 again -- and it failed after 32 seconds.
(I've defined failing as having the wall time clock stop, and the
system refuse to respond to the ESC key to reboot.)

The system is a fairly new white box, P4-2GHz.

I'm now trying to decide if the processor (or something else) is
marginal, or if I'm worrying about nothing -- it had an old Windows XP
installation that I'm planning on overwriting, possibly with
openSolaris, and I'd like to be sure that the hardware is OK before I
start storing data on this box (I'm looking at making it a file
server/data warehouse).

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
aka talexb
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