when is a hard drive failure not a hard drive failure?

no idea if any of the visitors to the funcave have seen this issue, but thought i'd pass along this handy tip.

because so much...is riding under your drive arm.

over the last 6-12 months, perhaps even a bit longer, your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy has had several clients who have had fairly new machines (less than 2 years old) start showing strange crashes, freezes, and even data corruption. and this behavior has been seen on both desktops and laptops.

at first we thought it was a uptick in hard drive failure rates...maybe a bad batch of drives, etc.

lo and behold, as we tested the machines on through, we found the real culprits!

failing memory chips.

and in every single case, it was factory-installed ram, not any memory that had been installed as a subsequent upgrade.

so...before you go calling for a hard drive replacement, run a decent mem tester on the computer first. here's one that has a place in my utility belt.

and...in case you are wondering about the make of the computers in question...

starts with d, rhymes with hell.

stay frosty, kids.