MemTest for Windows
October 18, 2009Jeff Zahorowski No Comments »
Problems due to faulty RAM can be difficult to diagnose. If a system’s RAM has gone bad the user can experience program crashes, spontaneous reboots, sudden system freezes, BSODs (Blue Screens of Death), corrupt data, and more. The problem is those symptoms could also be caused by a bad CPU. Or a bad motherboard. Or glitchy power. One classic method of diagnosing RAM problems is to replace the RAM and test to see if the symptoms disappear. But with CompTIA’s new emphasis on practical application in A+ certification, an A+ certification candidate should know which tools can make you sure. After all, no one wants to buy new RAM only to have their A+ certified tech then tell them, “Oops, I guess maybe it was the CPU. Or the motherboard. Or … ”
Hardware RAM testers exist, but are rare, and an A+ certified tech rarely would have access to one in the field. Software RAM testers are less reliable, but are often free and easy to include on a flash drive as part of a software toolkit. That makes them a go-to tool when the symptoms suggest bad RAM. False negatives are common—bad RAM will often be reported as A-OK after a scan. But if your RAM tester tells you your RAM is bad you have a smoking gun clearly implicating the culprit.
MemTest86 has long been the classic software tool for this job and it does the job well. A downside is that you must restart your computer, since MemTest86 can’t test your RAM while your operating system is using it. Thankfully, for those quick and dirty jobs, HCI Design has given us MemTest for Windows. It’s a Windows executable, so you just run the program and it starts testing away while Windows and maybe other apps are happily clicking away. If you think that MemTest for Windows can’t test RAM currently being used by other programs, you’re right. That may be a deal breaker for some, but MemTest for Windows will wait for currently used RAM to become available, and will test it when it does.
The end result is that the A+ certified tech can be confident that if they run MemTest for Windows for x hours, then one can be confident that the system is capable of running for x hours without any RAM related problems. Clever A+ certification candidates might realize that they could simply run a computer for x hours without any testing software, and prove that the system could run for x hours. But remember, the A+ certified technician is looking for that smoking gun that leads them to the culprit. If MemTest for Windows does throw an error, the A+ certified tech has closed the case with solid evidence.
CompTIA alerts A+ certification candidates that diagnosing RAM problems is covered in Domain 2.0: Troubleshooting, Repair & Maintenance on the A+ Essentials certification test, and Domain 1.0: Hardware on the A+ Practical Application certification test.
MemTest86 and MemTest for Windows are both freeware.
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