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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • TLDR: do memtest on your RAM

    I recently had an issue for quite some time where my computer would occasionally just hard crash. When it first started happening I tried many of the common tests including memcheck but found nothing. For a while it wasnt super common so I just lived through it. I thought it was an OS thing but it occurred on a different Linux distro and even on the ancient Windows 10 install I have but rarely use. I was just about to pull the trigger on replacing mobo and maybe even CPU+RAM. Before I did that I followed someone’s suggestion to do a mem test. I could have at least sworn that I already did that and it came clean but it was an easy enough test to run, so why not.

    Sure enough, found an error. I isolated the faulted DIMM, pulled it out and I haven’t had a crash since. Crazy since I’m all but certain I did both memtest from a Linux live iso and the Windows memory checking utility.

    In short, test your RAM. Do multiple passes. Maybe even just try swapping out single DIMMs and running on that for a reasonable ammount of time to see if you can isolate a culprit. It was my first thought when the issue first occurred because it’s usually what causes stuff like that. When the tests came up clean originally I assumed it had to be something else. I was wrong.