[Tfug] Memtest question

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Earl,

> > http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=12009443&m=490001082911
> This looks like what I'm getting.  I will chalk it up to a Dell
> characteristic.  I wonder about a company who has an
> error statement that says "keyboard not found.  Press F2 to enter setup."

Hmmm, interesting.  I had problems in a PE2500 under W2KS where
I would regularly (though not repeatably) get an NMI memory
error (reported through Windows BSOD).  Dell's memory diagnostics
would run flawlessly for 40-50 hours (beyond that it seemed silly
to run them).  OTOH, running W2KS would give me a crash every
day!

I eventually replaced the screen saver (pipes) with a different one
and the crashes stopped.  I *guessed* that something was writing
to a "corner" of memory in a way that wasn't friendly.  Perhaps
even something to do with the video card.  So, it could be that
the current screen saver tickles that region of memory less
frequently than "pipes" did?

Robotron 2084 had (has?) a similar problem whereby explosions
in certain corners of the screen would cause the game to crash.
I'm not sure if that was a result of the hardware (custom) "DMA"
or a software glitch (it happened infrequently enough to be difficult
to track down.  Yet, terribly annoying if you happened to be in
the middle of a game when this happened (since it usually happened
at higher "levels" when there is more happening on the screen).