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I lost quite a bit of time this week due to major system instabilities I was getting on my main work machine. I was getting frequent Blue Screens, with seemingly random causes. I initially assumed the problem was due to a problem with Flash on my firefox browser, because switching to Chrome actually fixed the problem for several days, but it then returned.

After downloading a very useful tool called “Blue Screen View” from Nirsoft, I could see that most of the BSOD turned out to be of the type “Page fault in Non Paged Area”, which indicates a RAM problem. I used the famous MemTest86+ t0 check every one of my 4 RAM sticks individually, and I found one stick which produced over 86 thousand errors just halfway through the first pass! After removing that stick of RAM the system is back to performing well, albeit with just 6GB of RAM instead of 8.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to buy RAM sticks individually, you almost always have to buy sticks in sets, so I have have to buy more than I need to get back to my preferred 8GB of RAM.

I thought this was worth posting about, since Blue Screens and RAM errors are both relatively common, and the aforementioned programs are invaluable in debugging and fixing them.

Below is a picture of the offending RAM stick. I don’t think Corsair Dominator is a bad brand, not at all, I have been a fan of Corsair memory for a long time. This is the only stick of RAM of theirs that has ever actually failed on me, and it’s about four years old.