Memtest - 5 passes - is that enough?

[mattkime]

Since upgrading to Leopard I've had hard crashes on a frequent basis. I wanted to rule out any hardware problems. I ran memtest for 5 passes last night - is that enough? I also suspect occasional spin up issues with the new hard drive I installed.

[Chupa Chupa]

Does the log give any indication of why the system is crashing? I remember when non-conforming RAM was crashing the MPs first came out the log made it clear that was the instigator of the crash.

I haven't read much about hardware issues w/ 10.5, but there is a smatter of s/w that will cripple it. I had a DiVX component that would kill my system right after the desktop launched. Once I removed it from the library all was well. Maybe they need to bring Conflict Catcher back. (Only half joking).

[papercup]

I seem to remember 3-5 being the typical amount. Did you run it from command-line?

I used Rember, which adds an interface to memtest. HERE: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24508


OWC Jamie has commented on using it a lot, you may want to PM him, or see what others say.

[mattkime]

The freezes I'm seeing tend to be -

beach balls and unresponsiveness on wake from sleep.

multilingual "restart your computer" type kernel panics.

with the last crash i didn't see any indication in the logs what caused the problem. i'll continue to check.

certainly, there is nothing i can do to trigger the crashes.

[IronMac]

Hrmm..make sure that your fan is working properly. I had what I thought was ram issues and ran Memtest many many times (overnight) and it kept giving me errors. I was pulling out memory sticks and testing each one when I was not pulling out my hair.

In the end it turned out that I had the equivalent of a cat's fur coat gumming up my CPU fan.

[Harbourmaster]

If you tryuly suspect a RAM problem I would run a minimum of 100 iterations before declaring the RAM O.K.

You need to run the test long enough to get a good running temp into the machine to really qualify the RAM.