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Well, I’ve never seen that before.

Micca suddenly had a Blue Screen Of Death yesterday morning. I knew that BSOD was still possible on Windows 7, but it has gotten very rare. Micca suddenly went to Blue Screen, complained of a memory problem, announced a memory dump, and shut off.

Restarting did not get far. The system would POST and start, but before getting to Windows, it would say there was a problem and try advise for the Recovery process. That would load, and then the system would restart. Going back to the DVD did not help, but I was able to run the Memory Diagnostic from it, which confirmed a hardware error.

So, the installed RAM sticks, or the slots on the motherboard?

Not having any other computers that use DDR-RAM, I called Drew, and managed to borrow a cup of RAM from him.

After swapping out the RAM modules, Micca started instantly with no problems. The RAM sticks had gone bad. I’ve known it can happen, though I’ve never run into it before.

Micca still had the two 1 GB sticks that he started with about six years ago. He now has four 1 GB sticks, which is the maximum his motherboard can take. Actually, the motherboard can’t properly address past 3.25 GB, so we’re not getting the full effect. Smudge is commenting that a few things (read: Star Wars: The Old Republic) are loading up faster now.

Still, I’m not entirely happy that this happened. I’ve been wanting to upgrade Smudge off of Micca to a much more modern system, and this is reinforcing my desire to get that done this year.