Failing Memory
It turns out that all the problems I've had with my computer system these past couple of months, other than the failed hard drive, have been because of a bad memory card.
My workstation is pretty big - in both physical and computer sense. I have 3 monitor cards, currently with 4 monitors spread in front of me. The system is a AMD quad-core processor with 8 Gigabytes of RAM and 3 Terabytes of disk configured so I see 2 Terabytes, the rest being mirrors/spares
Most of the time my machine has lots of spare RAM - my system meter shows it is using about 1.8 Gigs at the moment, and it typically is something less than 6 Gigs used for programs - the rest the system uses to help make the disk faster.
I thought I had some problems with some new software I'm running - a "latest and greatest" version of Linux with some speed-up items in it. I was dreading having to downgrade the system back to an older version.
The problems have been things like the browsers failing and closing - or difficulty with my email. Nothing that did any direct damage, at least until yesterday. Yesterday I pulled about 300 images off my camera and set my system to creating thumbnails of them - and noticed 3 images that were badly mauled in the process. This just could not be the operating system - so I booted up the system with a memory tester and low and behold - it failed!!!.
I traced the problem to one of the four modules - and had to downgrade to only 4 Gigs of RAM. I purchased a replacement set and here we are, back up and running and stable again. Whooopppppeeeeee!!!!
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