I’ve been working on some memory issues in my PC. They manifested as various memory errors and I’ve been aware of it for months. I just never took time to root it out. One thing that made troubleshooting the issue a pain is that RAM tests provided from companies like Microsoft did not scan deep enough. So this weekend the memory issues were too bad to overlook any longer. I found Memtest86 and it located errors in my RAM that other tools could not find. I’d recommend testing one RAM stick at a time. I was eventually able to find a good stick of RAM in my pile of PC parts. And the PC with problems can run off that while I exchange the bad RAM.

If you have ever had any memory related errors I’d highly recommend giving Memtest86 a try.

Some of the symptoms I experienced over time:

• I would sometimes see memory read errors in Windows, as I started some applications or was in the middle of using them.
• This weekend I had a “blue screen” crash and Windows reported a PFN_LIST_CORRUPT error.
• This weekend I had a “blue screen” crash and Windows reported a IO system verification error
• This weekend I had a “blue screen” crash and Windows reported a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA error.
• This weekend I had a “blue screen” crash and Windows reported a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error. If you think you have driver issues you can also try Windows Driver Verifier. I’d recommend checking the RAM first, unless you just installed something that you think could have caused the problem.
• This weekend I had a “blue screen” crash and Windows reported a PFN_LIST_CORRUPT error.

So if you’ve had any of those problems you might want to try Memtest86.

(Nobody paid me to recommend this FREE product. It is covered by Gnu Public License (GPL).)