linuxgeek: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: Distribution Question

Saturday, February 9, 2013

[LINUX_Newbies] Re: Distribution Question

--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "chi_joan_pc" wrote:
>
> I have the PNY package that the 2-1GB sticks came in, I bought it with the MSI motherboard and AMD AM2 940 socket CPU and PCI-E VGA card when I worked at CompUSA. I could've kicked myself when I bent and broke one of those pins on it. The only good thing is it no longer costs almost $200, on to EBay I suppose. I never had RAM go bad and it looked like it was the VGA card, then I guessed the MOBO. When the replacement arrived, I saw it didn't work either, that's when I tried pulling one RAM stick at a time. I tried the one that worked in both slots to be sure it wasn't the slot. So now I will be buying two CPUs eventually.
>
> I usually get older parts from other techs, since they know Linux can use older stuff. Then I try to trade or give the computers away, but those wanting laptops and tablets are making it harder.
>
> Joan in Reno
>

I've had lots of RAM go bad on me. I'd have to say it is one of the more common hardware problems to have. I don't even think high end CPUs have as many failure points in them yet as a 1 gigabyte RAM module has in it. Although what exactly happens inside RAM that makes it fail I've no idea. I always look at RAM I'm unfamiliar with as faulty until tested good.

The last RAM failure I had here was easy to diagnose, The machine ran, but acted like it only had 22MB of RAM, even though it had 512MB installed. I tried to open up a web browser and it got really slow! So I closed that, opened up a terminal, typed free -m and was like ah ha! As far as Linux was concerned I only had 22MB of RAM installed.

Shutdown, stick swap, and all was well. Until I tried opening that browser up everything seemed OK to me. My whole OS, and X session was fitting into that 22MB. I still can't figure out how I used to run Linux on 16MB of RAM with my 486 DX4-100. It seemed normal at the time ...

Video adapters may be a close second to RAM modules though. I've seen a number of those bad over the years.