Memory Errors, Corrupt downloaded files...

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pha3r0

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Hello everyone,

I have been some problems with a box i built for about the last 2 months and while they started very rare they have gotten a lot worse, particularly while playing World of Warcraft and downloading medium to large sized files.

My rig is an AMD 3600 64bit, 1gig of ram, NVIDIA 6950 GT, 400gig seagate drive (windows on half, ubuntu 7.10 linux on the other half) and an NVIDIA mainboard, ill dig up the model number if anyone thinks its necessary. I personally think this is related to my RAM being bad but I have run all the tests that memtest86+ has, including over 8 hours straight of the standard cycle with zero errors.

So far the most pervasive problem is when I am playing WoW I get a lot of crashes that come up as corrupt file reads or memory access errors. other problems include of course downloads ending up in a corrupt file, some very sparse crashes in Firefox and other much smaller games under both windows and linux.

I am by no means a pro but I've been building my own PC's for almost 10 years while dabbling in every aspect of them and I have yet to see something like this on a system i built.

I would very much appreciate any input on this thank you all in advance.
 
Not everything is ram related. Bad memory won't corrupt downloaded files while bad or simply drive heads on the other hand will. Some games love to access memory addresses reserved by Windows for system use causing crashes there.

With Linux also seeing problems you could be looking at the 400gb, flaky bios, weak battery on the board surprisingly more common if a year or more in use. Temp problems are another area of thought if you haven't been monitoring those at all. PC Wizard 3008 will show the video card temp as well as the cpu's and drive temps. CPUID
 
Update:

I have run some further memory tests and I am convinced its not the RAM itself now. I also tested my PS and I'm happy with the results there (everything came up within 0.1v of expected)

So the next place to look would be my hard drive I guess. It passed scandisk about a week ago when I defragged it, but I'm not sure that would necessarily tell me if a head was bad or whatever may be the problem.

So does anyone have a utility I can use to test it?
 
Seagate should have their own drive diagnostics tool as well as WD does. You simply go into their support>download pages for utilties there for a dos tool you load when booting from a 3 1/2" disk. Another tool is called HD tune for a 3rd party tool while the manufacturer's is usually the best to use. HD Tune
 
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