Diagnose Faulty RAM With Free Memory Diagnostic Utilities

Trouble:

My Old Desktop Started to restart abruptly and showing vague graphics abruptly. Computer boots and then restart. The behaviour of my desktop made me suspicious about a fault in either RAM or hard disk.

The reason I was suspicious about these two are that computer beep at startup was normal, that means the mother board and processor were ok, and RAM is properly fitted in the slot.

Then I run the hard disk scan and fitness test using a bootable utility, which I will cover in separate post soon. That test gave me results that hard disk is in good health.

But the question that came to my mind was:

How to Diagnose Faulty RAM?

I tried two different utilities for the same, I am going to share you the same with you in this post, and will tell you how you can use these free utilities.

Fix:

Let me share the two free memory diagnostic utilities one by one:

Memtest86 Memory Diagnostic:

It is an excellent stand alone memory diagnostic utility with very neat interface, it will run and scan all your RAM by accessing, reading and writing to different location of RAM. It will check whether RAM is working fine or not. Below is the screen-shot of output for my faulty RAM.

You can download this utility from this link as in ISO image and burn a CD of this image. Now you can simply boot with this CD and it will run the RAM test for you. Also if you have a Ubuntu setup CD, you can boot with ubuntu CD and select to launch Memtest86 utility from Ubuntu boot menu.

Windows Memory Diagnostic Utility:

Windows Memory Diagnostic is another free and light utility to diagnose RAM by Microsoft. It will run the test and will tell you whether the RAM has gone bad. See the screen-shot of the the same below:

This utility can run some standard and extended test as you need. You can download this free executable file from Microsoft here. When you run this executable, it will ask you to generate an ISO image, crate that image and burn a CD using that ISO file. Now boot with that bootable CD and the extended memory test will start automatically.

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Author + Admin: Abhishek Bhatnagar
Hi, I am a Software Engineer by profession and blogger by passion, I write about computer tips and tricks and solutions for computer problems. You can connect with me at twitter or know more about me on www.abhishekbhatnagar.com.