Mei-chan 8

Yesterday, I turned Mei-chan on, and after booting into openSUSE, Firefox loaded and immediately crashed. I rebooted and Firefox was fine after that.

Later on, I was transferring some files over from Taiga to Mei-chan and did a bit of spot-checking on the files, and the last two groups I was spot-checking had some erroneous checksums. With the last group, however, I kept getting different checksums, so I gave up and went to bed after finding out that bad RAM is one possible cause of inconsistent checksums.

This morning, after doing a bit of stuff on Melty, I transferred some files from Mei-chan to Melty before turning Melty off (probably for the rest of today). I then pulled out all the RAM from Mei-chan and put the first two sticks back in and ran Memtest86+. I got a lot of test errors and after a while of poking around in Memtest86+ and the net, I figured out what I needed to do and what to look for.

I ran one pass (and a bunch of other partial passes) with both sticks; one pass with stick 1 (and a few other partial passes while changing the voltage slightly, as well as trying bank 2); one pass with sticks 2, 3, and 4; then finally one pass with 3 and 4. Looks like the memory fault was located only on stick 1, which isn't bad.

After testing, I left sticks 3 and 4 in Mei-chan and proceeded to retest the last two groups of files that I gave up on and got matching checksums for the first group, and a couple bad checksums for the second group, which was remedied by redownloading the files from Taiga.

I then tested out stick 2 in the Dell and it seemed to work just fine, though it was running at DDR2 667 speeds instead of 800 speeds, but that was expected. Therefore, if I decided to give Lie-chan a new set of RAM (2x2GB), I can certainly put the old set into the Dell. I probably won't though, seeing the Dell doesn't really need that much RAM anyway.

Eventually I'll contact Corsair to get replacement RAM since it's not a major priority, as it's only one bad stick and 4GB of RAM is plenty to run Mei-chan with. Out of the 24 sticks of Corsair RAM that I've bought, I've only had one bad stick, which isn't too bad of a rate (4.167%).

To a point, I do wish that I had found the faulty stick sooner, since it would've been a lot easier to get a replacement than to have to live with the bad stick even though it never gave me any major problems until openSUSE 13.1, but as they say "What's done is done."

I could also install Windows on Mei-chan, but I don't think it'd really be all that worth it, since the only reason to would be to be able to play a couple games. Besides the fact that it'd be a major headache to redo the partitioning schemes and whatnot, it'd be hard for me to get comfortable with a long gaming session, as I'm usually either sitting on the bed or on a "cushion" on the floor. There's also the fact that I don't really use Mei-chan year-round, since she can raise the room temperature quite effectively in the summer (it can take her a bit longer in the winter, but she still does heat the room).

There's a bit of a load off of my shoulders, now that I know Mei-chan is stable, but the entire load will be off once I get and verify the replacement RAM.