Took me 6 hours to find a bad RAM stick that passed every diagnostic tool I had

I was chasing random blue screens on a Dell OptiPlex for days, swapped the PSU and motherboard before I finally tried pulling each stick one by one, and it turned out to be a single faulty module that Memtest86 and Windows Memory Diagnostic both said was fine, has anyone else had RAM that passed every test but still caused crashes?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_stella6h ago

and the thing that gets me is how long you spent chasing ghosts. had a similar situation with my old gaming PC a few years back, swapped the power supply and the graphics card before a buddy suggested reseating the RAM. turned out a single stick was just barely making contact in the slot, not even a bad module, just a little bit of dust making it act crazy. two minutes with a can of compressed air and it was fine, but i wasted a whole weekend. i still don't trust any diagnostic tool all the way.

carr.blake1h ago

The 6 hour mark is brutal, I wasted about 8 hours on a similar problem with a Lenovo laptop last year. I finally bought a cheap multimeter and started checking continuity on the RAM slot pins themselves, found one pin that had a hairline crack in the solder joint on the motherboard. A little dab of solder fixed it and it ran perfect for another 3 years after that. Have you checked the motherboard slot with a magnifying glass or even just a flashlight? Sometimes the issue isn't the stick itself but the connection on the board.