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How to detect RAM problems to stabilize Vista
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
I had a rough weekend testing Vista RTM on multiple hardware configurations because of some minor hardware issues that never 
surfaced previously. It appears that Vista is extremely sensitive to any kind of memory error possibly because of ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization). It turned out that I had a faulty address block near the end of my second 512 MB DDR2-533 DIMM. I never had any stability issues with Windows XP but I’m guessing that there was almost no chance of Windows being loaded in that portion of RAM. Vista on the other hand randomizes the address layout to mitigate any security breaches if a hacker finds any weaknesses in software but that also means it’s quite possible for a critical piece of Windows Vista to use the faulty memory block and lock up the entire operating system.
I recalled that colleague and friend Justin James was having similar problems with his brand new computer with Vista RTM MSDN edition and finding out that he had a bad stick of memory. In a similar fashion, Justin had no problems running Windows XP with the bad DIMM but once Justin got a replacement DIMM from Crucial, all his Vista lockup problems went away. I wondered if I had a similar problem so I decided to run some tests which proved my suspicions correct. ยป How to detect RAM problems to stabilize Vista | George Ou | ZDNet.com
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