RAM testing methods?

[davidro]

I *know* I have some bad RAM in my machine as I have had several kernel panics recently... the even less fun part is that it's a PowerMac 9500 which means I have 12 ram slots, of which I have 8 filled. I am looking for a way to test the ram and find out which ones are bad without pulling them out one at a time and running OSX until it crashes.

Any Mac OS X RAM test apps out there? UNIX apps are OK too!!!!

dAVE

... who had Aqua vanish in the middle of an MP3, yesterday.

[Reddog]

There are some RAM testing programs for OS 9. You might have more success looking for them. OS X is still too new.

It's a real pain in the butt, but don't automatically dismiss pulling the simms out. I once found that I had a bad slot that would give me bus errors if a simm was loaded into it.

If you do start pulling them out, get a piece of paper and keep track of what you're doing or you'll get lost for sure. Too many permutations are possible.

Pat

[davidro]

I pulled out 3 sticks of ram, the smallest one... and took notes on their sizes and slot locations.

Since then I have only had 1 kernel panic, although I think that is due to bugs in mpg123... as it only happens after about 45 minues of playing mp3's.

I also launched a ton of programs, and stuff in classic as well, to use up loads of ram. I used top to keep an eye on it and made it down to 4 mb free and had no issues... so AFAIK the bad ram is gone! I am down about 48mb to 384. I can live with it!

BTW, I will be testing the ram in another machine at some point to make sure that I can rule out bad ram slots as well.

Thanks for your help!

cheers,

dAVE