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From: akm@obelix.cs.uoregon.edu (Anant Kartik Mithal)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Spontaneous reboot.....
Summary: I'm also having memory errors...
Message-ID: <1991Apr17.053004.15749@cs.uoregon.edu>
Date: 17 Apr 91 05:30:04 GMT
References: <31988@usc> <11085@uwm.edu>
Sender: usenet@cs.uoregon.edu (Netnews Owner)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Oregon
Lines: 38

In article <11085@uwm.edu> aragorn@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Steve J White) writes:
>In article <31988@usc> rpinder@phad.hsc.usc.edu (Rich Pinder) writes:
>>At no particularily reproducable time the system does a re-boot.  Happens
>>!only! within windows applications.  System is a Northgate 25 mhz 486.
>  I have experienced the same type of problem.  My situation has to do with
>an inconsistency in RAM speeds.  I found out that ONE of my RAM chips is
>only a 120ns chip while the rest are 100ns.  By moving the chip around I
>found I could change the area of the trouble occurrences.  Go figure.  I
>replaced the 120ns chip with a 80ns chip.  Now the truoble is random 'main
>board parity errors.' Go figure.  It seems all related to memory so I'm
>upgrading my system memory to 2.5Mb. with 2 rows of 1Mb. chips and 2 rows of
>256Kb. chips.  It may even be all related to when I installed new system
>BIOS after installing a new 40Mb. EDI hard-disk.  It just seems to never
>end...

I've also been having similar problems. I recently went from 4 mb of
good SIMMS to 8 mb, in which the second 4 mb are suspect. Since then
I've been having a host of parity errors. It seems to me that
sometimes when I have a parity error (which seems to be always after
4864K, i.e, extended memory), windows undergoes a reboot. Could be
that the parity error causes some sort of protection fault... I've
been running my machine with parity turned off for a couple of weeks
now, and this has caused applications to die unexpectedly, presumably
when they hit the bad bit in a critical area. For example, I've had
the experience of trying to start word, having its original dialog box
come up, and then die...

Like Steve said, go figure... I also have the problem that I don't
know which one of the four simms is bad... so I don't know which one
to replace...

kartik

-- 
Anant Kartik Mithal                                     akm@cs.uoregon.edu
Research Assistant, 					(503)346-4408 (msgs)
Department of Computer Science,                         (503)346-3989 (direct)
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1202