Moderators: kirk, jamesbond, p310don, JakeSFR, step, Forum moderators
I have a machine that is giving me random errors lately. I'm pretty sure it is hardware related, but not sure if there's a way to tell what's causing the problem, whether it's a drive, memory or mobo or something else.
This is the screen dump I just got from a crash...
Any help or pointers?
Go through and re-seat all your ram and drive connections first, then just start eliminating potential sources. I'd start by running MemTest86 to check the ram, then surface check a hdd or health check if its a SSD. MemTest86 is pretty rigorous and would probably force a MB hardware problem to show too.
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
@wizard 100% on the money.
Memtest found 123140 errors in my RAM.
PC had a 16 and an 8gig stick. Did the test with one stick at a time, of course it was the 16 that died 
Running on 8gig now, which realistically will suffice, but was nice to have lots of extra...
Seems to be a common problem. Boot fails - indicating problems with swap, many saying they don't have/use swap ... do a memtest and find many errors, swap out the memory and back to working again. Would be nice if the dump message gave a better pointer as to the likely cause.
@fatdoguser my googling pointed to swap. Spoke to jamesbond, his first response was that the message suggested swap problems, but no swap, dodgy hardware.
The hardest part about this for me has been figuring out where to start looking. The PC has been playing up for about two weeks. Any large file transfers it'd hang. Then tabs would crash randomly in chrome, then all of chrome would shut down. Things were pretty random. This crash today with the screen dump pictured in the OP was the best clue to what's wrong. And even then it was vague!
A guy I worked with who maintained the computers for the shop told me once that most computer problems went away after he cleaned out the machine, including removing and reinstalling the RAM.
