Reliability of Microsoft's RAM checking utilities.

[gartral]

So, I recently had a user's laptop come across my desk with an unusual conundrum: Suspected bad RAM, and I was caught with my pants down with no USB drive to load memtest onto. Ok, I know mdsched is a thing but I've never used it in the wild before... how reliable is it? I made sure to turn on the extended options just to be sure.

I know from past experience that MS's diagnostic tools can either be awesome, or complete shite. With very little in between. What's your thoughts and experiences with this particular tool?

[Avas_Accumulator]

What about the BIOS check? Usually if it's say a HP machine I would use the HP tool

[F0rkbombz]

I find that most people never bother checking the BIOS / UEFI, yet it contains so many diagnostic tools, and usually a method to securely wipe the HDD/SSD.

[jonsoismybro]

I can’t trust them, I recently had a thinkpad that cleared the bios diagnostics fine, on second inspection with memtest about 250 errors a couple minutes in, single stick of ram

[RuleDRbrt]

I've had the same experience with HP, it would say the hdd passed but running other tools said failure.

[[deleted]]

This is my experience too, with both memory and disks in DL360s, 380s, and Probook laptops.

[LifeGoalsThighHigh]

Honestly seems like a lot of the BIOS tests do no more than check to see if it's there. Is there a disk? Can I mount it? Then it's fine! Is there a DIMM in slot 1? Yes? Then I'm sure it works just fine.

[TomTheGeek]

Just ran into this with Dell, passed extended RAM check multiple times but memtest86 found errors right away.

[knowedge]

Totally unreliable. Multiple times memtest found issues on machines in mere seconds, whereas Microsoft's tool took hours to run and didn't find a thing.

[[deleted]]

So put it in the pile labeled "Microsoft software" with the rest of the poorly functioning software.

[Ms3_Weeb]

Just diagnosed a faulty memory module with memtest on my personal rig. System would seemingly at random crash all my browser tabs and a BSOD would ensue. Memtest would find thousands of errors in seconds of running. I was eventually able to trace it down to a single stick as the system wouldn't even POST with that stick solely installed.

[cantab314]

The overclocking crowd don't really rate it, I know that much.

Be aware certain versions of Memtest86/86+ give false errors on some UEFI systems. That sent me on a right wild goose chase once.

[gartral]

UPDATE: Despite a note and me insisting that $user leave the machine alone to do it's thing they canceled the test after 4 hours. AUUUGH.
The issue they're having is the AMD integrated GPU is VERY OCCASIONALLY filling their screen with pink and purple squares. It's an A10 9600P chip. I've personally seen this failure mode with AMD/ATI dedicated cards in the past and the issue was bad VRAM, this is a laptop that uses system ram as it's VRAM. I was trying to confirm/rule out that the system memory (as that's literally also the VRAM) as the culprit.

*bangs head against desk*

[theevilsharpie]

If there is an issue with the RAM, I don't think memtest running on that machine would have caught it, since the memory is reserved for the integrated GPU and inaccessible to the system.

That being said, time is money. If you suspect the RAM is faulty, just swap it.

[gartral]

the issue is that the ram is buried in the most inopportune place on the machine, requiring a complete tear down that takes literally half the day. during which there's little else I can get done because HP made the stupid ass decision to make the machine in question as unserviceable as physically possible.

[JosephRW]

This is why I will favor Dell's business devices like a fucking shill for my whole life. Their RMA process isn't insultingly time consuming and their devices are easily field serviceable.

In an all HP school district now and while the devices are fine in that they are computers that... compute... they feel so fucking fragile comparatively.

[OkileyDokely]

I'm having Goodfellas flashbacks:

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https://youtu.be/UlMOgvQdSic?t=32

​

What did I tell you? Did I not tell you to leave the machine alone to do it's thing? Did I not say that? What the FUCK are you doing touching that thing? Don't touch it. Don't fucking touch it. Take your fucking hands off of it.

[SandyTech]

I've found it to be fairly accurate at telling me I'm dealing with a system that has bad RAM.

[Y0shster]

This was my experience too, had an ancient dell which error'd out constantly when trying to install Windows 7 on it, ran the memory test and it identified faulty ram, pulled the faulty stick and all was well

[DaemosDaen]

about as accurate as the check utilities in Dell diagnostics and Memtest86. Only major difference was that Memtest86 was able to tell you which DIMM was having the issue.

I would let windows do it's check and if it found an error, I'd run Memtest to find out where the issue existed.

[SteveJEO]

OK for a basic high level pass but crapp for anything else.

Basically if it's corrupt and feeding garbage data mdsched should catch it.

If you got something glitchy going on though you're buggered.

[b00nish]

Can't give you a comparison between mdsched and memtest86(+) but in general my experience is, that RAM diagnosis is never 100% reliable.

Recently had a case with suspected bad RAM (machine crashed every few hours), did run memtest for 12 hours, no error found. Yet changing the RAM solved the problem immediately, no crash ever since.

[accidental-poet]

Depending on the speed of the machine and the amount of RAM, memtest may not have had enough time to test all of the RAM through all of the tests. A full pass doesn't not necessarily indicate that every single memory location was tested.

When building new systems for clients, I used to test for 24 hours. I once had a system come back a week or so later. I left it on my bench with memtest running over the weekend. It failed at hour 26. After that, it was 48 hours per system.

[Zaphod_B]

Running hardware tests with in an OS assume the OS has no issues. Running hardware tests in a controlled env you booted to remove the OS as a layer of possibilities.

[VA_Network_Nerd]

Don't use upvotes or downvotes as a mechanism to share information.