Reformat/Reinstall of Windows 7 on my laptop...and then...

[orinthia]

3469 errors... wow, one of those stick is bad, or both. test individually if you care, or see if you can borrow one stick from a friend and run test again to make sure it's not the motherboard (well that's the paranoid cat in me).

edit: it's more than likely both sticks went bad, but it might not be a bad idea to test more stuff, and individually if you can.

[archibaldcrane]

I thought the bad sticks had errors in the hundreds of thousands?

[archibaldcrane]

After my last restart i get this

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...ps75jj59zh.jpg

[archibaldcrane]

And then this

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...pscyrxpn0j.jpg

[orinthia]

Holy shit everything's going down lol.

Ram doesn't have to have tons of errors in that test for it to be bad, only enough to corrupt whatever was being stored. Any errors means it's not reliable enough for normal use. Hdd's SMART protection is an ongoing record of some performance stats that the drive constantly keeps a tab on. These stats aren't perfect but give some small idea on the drive's health. If it's panicking about drive health, I'd take it seriously, which sucks in your case since things just keep getting worse .

[archibaldcrane]

Well if my RAM and HDD are both fucked I should probably just get a new laptop, which is a shame.

[Buffy]

HD replacement on most laptops is wicked easy.

[archibaldcrane]

I suppose I could grab a 1tb hybrid for like 80 bucks and try to keep it going.

[Buffy]

Just depends how good the rest of the laptop is and how bad the ram is.

Honestly if the laptop is more than 4-5 years old, it's probably reached the end of its useful life anyway. Laptop hardware gets old in a hurry.

[archibaldcrane]

Keyboard / screen / touchpad / ports are great. I like the HDMI out, because of how much we torrent and watch tv on the big screen.

[Hadley]

Does your laptop have more than one RAM module installed? If so, you can pull out one of them and run the test again to identify if one or both are defective. If it ends up being just one, you can roll with the functional one for the time being to improve stability.

[archibaldcrane]

I ordered a WD hybrid 1gb hard drive to replace my failed disk. Running memtest on the 4gb chip alone right now, will post results for that and the 2gb alone.

[archibaldcrane]

In the deeper slot:

4gb chip:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...psax91161g.jpg

2gb chip:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...ps25nxdwrb.jpg

[archibaldcrane]

So I should probably buy new RAM eh? It looks like a single 8gb stick is the same price (crucial on Amazon) as 2x4gb sticks. Is one or two "better"?

[archibaldcrane]

Sounds like 2 is a little better than 1, unless I want to jump to 16gb later, but I doubt it.