From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2006-10-11T11:51:48+09:00
Subject: Re: rubyforge.org down

From: "Tom Copeland" <tom@infoether.com>
>
> Yup, it's getting to the point where suggestions like "let's replace all
> the RAM chips" are starting to sound reasonable.  Although I hate to
> pester RubyCentral for more hardware money...

I had RAM go bad on one of our home PC's last year.  It does
take awhile to get to that "let's replace all the RAM chips"
threshold, doesn't it.  I forget all the troubleshooting steps
I'd taken before arriving there, but they were many.  The 
problem manifested itself in such weird ways.  It got to the
point where I wanted to download and re-apply the microsoft
service packs (this was a win2k box), and when I'd download
the 30MB file from the networked PC upstairs, it wouldn't
extract properly, claiming it was corrupted.  I forget all
the diagnostics I tried (other symptoms were random crashes
of applications or the whole OS)... eventually after 
replacing IDE cables and I think even the boot/system hard
drive, I realized, jesus it might well be the RAM.  Turned 
out it was!  The last time I'd had RAM go bad was about 14
years earlier on an Amiga development system.  :-)

Good luck!

If your motherboard is flexible with RAM configuration and
you have multiple DIMMs, maybe you'll be able to try
swapping out some DIMMs and hopefully end up isolating 
the bad one.  (That's what I did, but the system only had
two DIMMs, so it was easy.)


Regards,

Bill