[PLUG] I think my new RAM died

Matt McKenzie lnxknight at gmail.com
Fri Feb 20 21:14:21 UTC 2009


Have you tried running Memtest86?
Good way to determine if it is a hardware RAM issue.
I usually run at least 2 passes with any new RAM purchase to make sure they
aren't duds (DOA, or static shock or etc).  MemTest isn't perfect but it can
catch a number of problems.

----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:19 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>wrote:

> My Thinkpad T61 had two 1-GB sticks in it for a couple of years. Last
> November I replaced them with two brand new 2-GB sticks.
>
> Everything continued to work fine until this morning. Suddenly
> everything was running very slow. I was unable to send a 40 MB PDF file
> to a printer, even with the cp command. The System > Administration >
> System Monitor GUI and top did not show anything unusual, except that
> xorg would cycle up and down between 7-8% CPU and 50-60%. I had been
> using Xsane quite a lot over the previous 24 hours, so I suspected a
> memory leak. I did free at the command line and it appeared that all
> four GB were used up and I was into the 4 GB swap partition.
>
> I started trying to repair the problem by shutting down all running
> programs, starting with Xsane. Nothing helped. Eventually I rebooted.
> And when X tried to come up I got that endless loop between the nVidia
> splash screen and a command line. (I've seen this before on occasion,
> althopugh I don't recall if it was my computer or someone else's at the
> Clinic.) I couldn't get it to stop the looping long enough to take an
> Alt-F1 command, so I rebooted again in recovery mode, and then got a
> root command line.
>
> All I did at the command line was switch /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the
> nVidia driver to the nv driver by editing it with nano. Then I rebooted
> to the normal boot option. When it came up it took forever, but
> eventually X came up, I got a login prompt, and here I am back with a
> functioning computer (sans nVidia driver).
>
> Side comment: This time the nVidia splash screen did not come up, so I
> assume I'm using the nv driver. However, I know that when someone is
> using the nVidia driver the text in the login boxes will be very large.
> When using the nv driver the username and password asterisks will
> appear much smaller. OK, this time I did not get the nVidia splash
> screen, but I did get the supersized text. Not sure what that means. A
> command to find out which driver I'm actually using at the moment would
> be helpful.
>
> But here is the real issue. The computer is running, but it takes way
> too long for stuff to happen. Just opening a terminal window takes 30
> seconds, where it should pop up in three or four seconds.
>
> Here is what I get for memory usage:
>
> jjj at Devil7:~$ free
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers
> cached Mem:       3988812    3964632      24180          0
> 16844    2912324 -/+ buffers/cache:    1035464    2953348
> Swap:      3903752       2320    3901432
>
> I do not know how to read the above. It appears that it is using all 4
> GB or RAM and also some of the swap. Yet I just rebooted. The only
> thing that is running is the terminal window and Sylpheed (mail
> client). If it is using that much RAM, something is seriously wrong.
>
> Suggestions needed!
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