[Techtalk] Trouble with upgrading RAM

[Riccarda Cassini]

Hi everyone,

I seem to be having a hardware problem - at least I think so...
I recently upgraded my somewhat older box (Athlon 800MHz generation)
to 512MB RAM.  Originally, there was one 256MB module in the machine,
and I put in another one, which looks rather identical to me (even same
manufacturer: Fujitsu-Siemens, if that matters).  From that moment on,
I've been experiencing sporadic hangups or crashes - about once every
other day, on average. At least considerably more often than I've come
to expect from a system running Linux.  The exact symptoms vary widely:
applications coredumping, X server crashing or freezing, kernel oops,
and in some cases, not even a warm boot was possible any more, so I had
to use the physical reset button to restart the machine.

I luckily don't seem to have lost any vital data until now, but it is
a little annoying to have to wait for the forced filesystem check to
complete every time (takes more than 20 minutes for my 80GB disk...) 
Yes, I know it's my own fault that I'm still using ext2, and not some
journaled filesystem like ext3, Reiser or XFS... [*]

I got the RAM module from a friend, who no longer needs it. He assured
me that he never had any problems with it. As I didn't pay a cent, and
in fact don't know him that well, I don't really want to bother him
with any hard to find hardware troubles.

I ran memtest86 for a couple of hours, and it didn't report any errors.
>From this I conclude that the module does at least not have a permanent
defect.  I then removed the original (working) RAM module, so now there
was only the potentially defective module in the machine. Surprisingly,
with this, I was no longer experiencing any crashes during the period I
was running this hardware setup (for about three weeks).

Hoping that the problem would've magically disappeared somehow in the
meantime, I put the second RAM module back in a couple of days ago. 
Well, it hasn't - same problem again :-(

Someone at work suggested it might be the power supply.  Not being a
hardware geek, I can't really say whether that would make sense. The
same machine was working without any problems for over two years now.
So, before I go off to buy a new power supply, I'd like to get some
other opinions on that issue.

If there are any hardware details I should've mentioned, I'll try to
supply them...

Thanks in advance,

Riccarda


[*] BTW, any recommendations on which filesystem to use? Any good/bad
experiences with some of them, WRT speed, stability, error recovery
facilities, and whatever else there might be relevant.  I've heard
opinions that XFS is performing rather well in most aspects, so I'm
considering to try this one, if I should finally pluck up the courage
to kick out my old ext2.
(I'm aware that a topic like this might possess a certain inflammatory
potential, as with any topics that involve personal preferences or
experience, like editors, window managers, programming languages, etc.
As I've observed so far on these lists, however, cases like these are
handled remarkably well - so I dared asking :-)



-- 
NEU : GMX Internet.FreeDSL
Ab sofort DSL-Tarif ohne Grundgebühr: http://www.gmx.net/dsl