RAM Explodes - DIMM-inished performance

Greetings to all.

I wanted to post both the problem and the resolution to that problem for future troubleshooting reference.

My wife's PC went stupid yesterday without warning.  While working on her semester project for school, the PC began throwing off multiple error messages, rebooting, making popping noises, and locking up, though not all at the same time, in the same sequence, or at any regular interval or pattern than I could discern or reproduce.  The PC is a homebuilt AMD 1.13ghz on a Tyan board, dual booting XP Pro/Win98, a domain member to my home LAN with an NT4 server. Has run more or less flawlessly for over 2 years.  The error messages were all over the place, including references to bad, missing or corrupted files such
as (I'm paraphrasing here- my notes are at home) NTFS.sys, ISASS.sys, page faults, non-page faults, non-equal somethings, BSODs, freezes, etc.

The power supply and fans seemed to work OK, and since I could see the XP login screen, I assumed the video card was operational. I tried booting using the XP cd, using the F8 safe mode, boot logging, replacing *.sys files, video drivers, etc.  In short, I was chasing a perceived software problem.  Still no joy. The PC would boot normally, log on to the network, and begin retrieving the personal settings and then die.  Sometimes I got further along, sometimes not.  The more I chased problems, the more I saw this PC going from stupid to dead.

Hours later, after the N-th non-productive reboot, I sat there watching the POST screen go by while trying to figure out how to tell my wife her most recent work on her school paper was likely toast, when I noticed the initial POST message showing the RAM c
ount was reporting 256K ram.  Then it dawned on me.  Last I checked, her PC had 384M.  That, plus the popping sound she reported but which I never heard, led me to closely examine the DIMMS. Sure enough, though the 256M Crucial stick was fine,  one of the two 64M Kingston Value DIMMS had a slight discoloration on each of the individual on-board chips, as though they had "exploded" inside.  I rebooted using only the single Crucial stick, the machine immediately found the last known good boot sequence, became sentient and stable. (Yes, a CD containing her most recent work was immediately created.)

Anybody ever seen this before?  This is not an over-clocked PC.  It is adequately cooled and was running only the usual office apps.  Bottom line, for me anyway, is even if it first looks like a software problem, don't get so focused on chasing random errors that you overlook a more fundamental hardware problem. I’ve used lots of Crucial, Kingston, and generic DIMMS
 in all my PC’s but this is the first failure I’ve experienced with any of them. Maybe that explains why I didn't look at them eariler. Anyway, I plan to stick the suspect DIMMS in a test bed PC to see what happens.

Robert Cunningham

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