Bad RAM modules, please help

[ramik]

Since about 1 month, my Windows XP started behaving strangely, errors, shutdowns, reboot, i thought it was from SP2 (which i installed a week before).

til yesterday when it won't boot even, after the startup xp logo, it just reboot, even in safe mode.

i spent hours till i was able to put a clean winxp on another partition, and guess what, it also started the same problems.

i went and tried memtest/goldmemory/memdiag software, and they all say i have bad memory...

goldmem reports that i have 2 bits corrupted (every new seconds i get an error in some location, it writes 0000000 and reads 040000, etc).

i didn't change any hardware options (only replaced the cd writer to a dvd writer, and this was in july).

i have A7V133 Motherboard with 384MB (256+128)of SD-RAM, running at 133 MHz bus (the same as from 3 years ago).

what is the solution?

i know i had to try the memory module each one alone to know which one is bad, and also try them on another computer, but this will be tomorrow, today no time..

ideas:

- could it be dust on the pins or something?

- old age of memory?

- heat? case temp these days is 30-35, in summer it used to reach 40-45 sometimes.

[ramik]

another question:

do such programs report errors on good memory modules?

[CoffeeFiend]

I rely on memtest86 v3. It's finds all errors and never reports errors on good modules. It's free, small, and available as a bootcd. Give it a try I always keep it around, it's came in handy many, many times already.

http://www.memtest86.com/

[edit]

looks like there they came up with something newer:

memtest86+

http://www.memtest.org/

[ramik]

problem solved, it was just dust, now memory is good.

[SiMoNsAyS]

problem solved, it was just dust, now memory is good.

hahaha, first enemy of every pc... dust!