DO NOT REPLY. BORROWING ACCOUNT. REPLY TO fmgst+@pitt.edu. THANKS

        Greetings. I'm new to Linux (in fact, today was the first time I
        got the boot & root disks to work... WOW! :-) but have a possible
        solution to some peoples' problems.

        A few years back I got a 80486/25 with 8 megs of ram, a 200MB
        IDE, and a ProDesigner II VGA board and monitor. All was dandy
        except that MS-Windows 3.0 would *reboot* my machine once in a
        while. Support had no idea what the heck was wrong - and they
        had the pleasure of playing with my motherboard twice :-) and
        they finally sent me a new motherboard (but put the old RAM from
        the original: hint-hint).

        Well, I just stayed away from Windows utill I got 3.1. Just
        after the installation I got the message I was waiting for -
        "Partity error. System Halted" At least I now knew what the
        hell was going on. After fooling with the 8 SIMMs I found one
        that would crash Windows:

                My test consisted of running 16 tasks of "Shaker" which
                comes with MicroSoft C SDK and "shakes" memory around
                to see if your program uses malloc() or the new one
                that you're supposed to use - basicly ABUSES all the
                RAM in the system.

        Well, it turned out to be one darn 1MB SIMM that was the
        problem. Again, the problem ONLY and I mean ONLY showed up
        in Windows - not even extended memory testers or other system
        "burn-in" programs (like CPU24.ZIP on 135.252.135.4) 

        Is your Linux crashing NOW-AND-THEN? Is your MS-WINDOWS also 
        crashing now-and-then? CHECK THAT RAM!!!

        By the way, after pulling the "offending" SIMM, I noticed that
        it's the "old" 9 chip design. I'm not sure it it's just shoddy
        assembly (probably, since the contacts are only tinned not gold-
        plated) but some of the chips were DARN close to each other - the
        spacing was not even. Some leads ALMOST touched at room-temp and
        I can only wonder what they did after being "shaken".... ;-)

        So, next time you're upgrading RAM, get the new 3-chip SIMMs and
        (with the prices being what they are) get faster ones.

        
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