Reading Aynjell's journal

As this thread's title would imply linux has crashed on me, several times, even. During the course of oh, say, 2 days maybe 10 times, it has up and quit. Upon reading some fairly cryptic error messages, I noticed the words paging and cache. "Shit!" I thought, that couled be the CPU or RAM. Either way, it's hardware failure.

So, as any linux liveCD should, gentoo comes with a memory tester built into their install CD. Turns out, that a very specific memory location consistently failed, and these errors were only noticed at the end of each flyby on the RAM.

So, I did what any crazy son of a bitch who wants thier computer to work would do: He cut it open and took out the second stick of RAM. Upon my return to memtest86 it was faster (due to less RAM to test) and it never errored once. Faulty RAM, and kingston at that?

Damn it. I just hope the company I purchased from has a decent RMA policy...

I should be ashamed of myself.

Yay, a year of parts and labour. Got it fixed today...

*grins*

I should be ashamed of myself.

Faulty hardware will make any OS crash. But yeah the symptoms definitely sound like a memory problem. I've seen that all too often. With the higher speed memory it's pretty damn common!