
Friends don't let Friends install Used RAM - geocrasher
http://miscdotgeek.com/friends-dont-let-friends-install-used-ram/
======
sigio
Very low on detail, no analysis what caused this. I've never had issues with
ram upgrades. Ram either works fine, or it reports errors in memtest (or
reports errors under high load).

Chance of ram issues causing other hardware failure... ZERO

~~~
Laforet
Once upon a time I bought a new laptop and all's well. Several months later,
however, it developed a problem: Within 10 minutes of connecting to the
internet using the onboard modem (this was really a while ago) the OS will
crash after ~10 minutes of normal operation. Various software patches and
driver updates were promptly applied but to no avail, once connected no matter
what actions you take it will consistently throw a BSoD without any hint of
trouble after a few minutes. Considering the fact that the system was 100%
stable offline it seemed fair to conclude that the modem was faulty.

Except that when I procured an external modem it reproduced the exact same
issue.

A lot of time was wasted trying to figure out what happened. Several fruitless
rounds of OS reinstalls later I started to swap test any removable component
out of desperation (there really wasn't many on a laptop) and voila the
problem went away once a particular stick of RAM had been removed. Later tests
found that it will pass most tests in MemTest86+ except this a copy operation
over repeated runs.

I have no idea why the symptoms were so peculiar, perhaps when using dial-up
connections the OS had been repeatedly loading the network stack in the memory
address close to the affected blocks and after a while it will inevitably
encounter a IO error and crash. This is just one personal anecdote, but with a
complex system it is certainly possible for RAM issues to appear like other
kinds of failure.

------
dotdi
Are you sure you didn't kill all of those components with some huge
electrostatic charge you had on yourself? And blaming it on some other random
thing? How exactly will a mystery RAM fry a GPU?

~~~
geocrasher
I've added some notes to the end of the article that clarify this.

------
zamalek
On that note; friends don't let friends buy cheap thumb drives. We got a batch
of them in high school and they gave us all one. Free stuff! They fried the
USB controller of every single PC that they were plugged into. The replacement
motherboards were not free.

~~~
Already__Taken
Anecdote: Some kid brought a pen drive into our school and it blue screened
the PC only when he copied a certain image file to it. Anything else was fine.

------
jacquesm
You can use used RAM just fine. Put it through a very thorough test before
using the machine (and you should do that with new RAM just the same). And
seeing _new_ RAM fail within 90 days of purchase or so is not rare at all,
even for very expensive brands. The risk is mostly in how you handle the
modules, if you do that well and whoever removed it did that well too then
there is no risk that you wouldn't have if you bought new.

The only reason you won't know about a lot of RAM failures is because ECC
isn't as common as it should be.

Flagged for jumping to conclusions and not understanding the basic material in
spite of being a self-declared professional in the field.

------
barrkel
This one time, a guy died in a car accident; friends don't let friends drive.

This one time, a guy died in a bicycle accident; friends don't let friends
ride.

And so on.

------
slashink
Why is this on HN? Seriously a blog post made up of reaction images with no
concrete facts and the strangest conclusion.

------
hbogert
His work PC is supposedly very important to him. Yet the same blogpost tells
him that he unlocked cores and overclocked his CPU. Further, his PC felt "dog"
slow because he installed a 32-bit OS. As if that ever made a day-night
difference in performance when doing mild testing.

------
Avernar
I hade a similar problem with one of my servers. The SSDs would stop
responding at odd times. Strange lockups and other hardware wierdness. When I
tried putting FreeBSD on it it would kernel panic at odd times during the
instalation.

Turns out the CPU aux power connector was not hooked up. I must have knocked
it loose while working on the innards a while back. The machine has been rock
solid ever since I reconnected it.

------
cokernel
I wouldn't read this expecting a condemnation of (or evidence against)
installing using RAM. It's a comedy of errors brought about by the hero's
hubris (and tiredness). The author is not really suggesting that you should
never install used RAM.

Consider it a longform version of
[https://xkcd.com/349/](https://xkcd.com/349/) .

~~~
geocrasher
You get me.

------
PythonicAlpha
One question on behalf of this: Has anybody experiences with mixing RAM types
today? My problem is, that new computers most of the time come with 4GB pre-
installed (1 module), but I want to have 8GB. Get the same RAM (DDR3) is
rather unlikely -- so, would you add a different RAM module to the preexisting
memory module or is it better to replace it with a pair of new RAM modules?

Any experiences, opinions?

~~~
ferongr
My experience comes from an Ivy Bridge machine with a B75 chipset and 4 RAM
slots, YMMV.

I had a single 2GB 1333MHz stick and bought another one second-hand. The
sticks had different densities (one had 4 and the other 8 memory chips on) but
timings were the same. The system would not boot with the sticks on the same
bank (same slot color) but when I moved one stick to a different bank, the
system booted and BIOS indicated the memory was operating in dual channel mode
at correct timings. I didn't experience any issues with the system for 1 year.

If your machine only has two RAM slots with a single bank, then it's a
crapshoot on whether the system will boot. With two different banks you can
usually mix non-matching memory.

~~~
RealityVoid
Huh, wierd, to my knowledge, in order for dual channel to work, they have to
be on the same bank.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
Yes, I would have expected the same.

------
venomsnake
And what exactly was the problem? How exactly the RAM caused this?

~~~
q3k
I don't know either. The article is a graphomaniac mess with little structured
substance to it, and even less proper troubleshooting discipline present in
the author's steps.

~~~
geocrasher
That was kind of the point of the article really. I screwed up. Made mistakes.
The frenzied approach to the article reflects the experience I put myself
through. I added a summary that hopefully drives home the point better and
offers some hindsight to it. Thanks for your comments, it made me realize what
I left out.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
The only big risk with new RAM is if it has a lower speed than the other RAM
in your system, as (correct me if I'm wrong) that can slow down your other RAM
modules.

------
tr352
I don't get it. What caused the problems? The bad ram or the 32 bit windows?
It makes no sense that a 32 bit windows only acts up _after_ trying bad RAM.

------
MrSlo
A bit of a misleading title, in the end he had a 32bit installation of
Windows... he upgraded to the 64bit version and everything was fine. No RAM to
blame.

~~~
wjoe
I think that was just with his fresh install which caused additional problems,
he still had other issues with his original install, which I assume was 64
bit. It's not exactly clear from his writing though.

Also this makes me wonder why 32 bit versions of Windows 10 even exist. Are 32
bit x86 CPUs even being made? I thought they were phased out a long time ago,
and any hardware from that era would struggle to run Windows 10.

------
rasz_pl
TLDR: ESD followed by cargo cult thinking

------
syntaxgoonoo
Correlation does not imply causation.

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kup0
Used RAM is fine. Article not worth your time.

------
unixhero
Bullshit article

