Bad RAM more common than you'd think

Why'd your computer crash on you? It's easy to blame Microsoft or a bum device driver (I know, I do it all the time, myself), but any number of issues may really be at fault when the blue screen of death comes a-callin'.

This week Google, courtesy data gleaned from the thousands of computers it operates and upon which it keeps religious tabs, offers some insight into a relatively unheralded and poorly-understood problem that all computers may eventually encounter: Bad RAM.

The bottom line is that RAM errors "are not rare events," according to the academics and Google researchers looking into the problem, and that error rates are "much higher than previously reported" when looking at memory units.

To simplify the information presented in the study: Roughly one in three servers on the Google network experienced a RAM fault over the course of a year of operation. Google servers (along with most servers) use a special type of RAM which allows errors to be recovered from without a crash. Typical desktop and laptop RAM does not have this feature, so a bug in the RAM chip typically means a crash.

The good news is that PC-based RAM problems aren't often that bad since PC RAM is often used to "park" data for longer periods of time than you'd think. In servers, RAM is used much more frequently, so a bad sector can create a much bigger problem. The bad news is that diagnosing a RAM problem isn't exactly easy. Tools like Memtest86 can help, but few users have ever even heard of these programs, much less run them regularly to diagnose crash situations.

Ultimately there's not a whole lot you can do about any of this. But if you're experiencing a lot of problems and find you're not doing the same thing every time the computer crashes, give Memtest86 a try -- you never know what it'll turn up. Maybe your computer problems aren't your fault at all... unless you're winter-born or something.