MemTest 1.0 | (c) 2000 |
MemTest is a RAM reliability tester; it tests the ability of your computer's memory to store and retrieve data. A correctly functioning computer should be able to do both these tasks with 100% accuracy - a computer that cannot, perhaps because of old hardware, damaged hardware, or poorly configured hardware, will be less stable and crash more often, and will become even less stable over time as corrupted data is written to your hard disk.
By running MemTest, you can insure that your computer's ram is correctly functioning, a good thing to check whenever you buy a new computer, install new ram, or change the configuration of your machine (for instance, to overclock it). If you are the sort of user who like to push the performance of your machine to the edge, relying upon whether your machine will boot after your new BIOS tweaks is a poor way to determine the safety of your new settings, you should use MemTest as a true test of stability.
Unlike other memory checking software, MemTest is designed to find all types of memory errors including intermittent problems. Therefore, it needs to be run for several hours to truly evaluate your ram. The best way to use the system is to set it up to run overnight, for a fully rigorous test. Letting MemTest run long enough to achieve 100% coverage will only identify ram that is consistently corrupts all data written to it.
To keep the test running smoothly and quickly, you should only test the amount of ram that is free, rather than the total amount of ram in your system - otherwise your computer will spend 90% of the test reading and writing to your hard drive, rather than testing ram. You can use the Windows2000 Task Manager, or the Windows 9X System Monitor to determine the proper amount of ram to check. As a rule of thumb, Win9X uses about 32MB of ram when nothing is open, and Windows2000 uses about 64MB.
MemCheck tests the ability of your ram to store up to 4 billion different patterns of bits in ram, and the ability of that ram to correctly hold those values over long periods of time. This method ensures that no matter what the nature of the error, if you ram makes it, MemCheck will catch it, if only you run it long enough. 4 billion different pattern per each 32bits of ram takes a very long time to check, so instead it checks a large enough subset to ensure that all bit patterns will be storable. The size of the sample directly correlates to the length of the run, so as stated above, the proper way to test is overnight - if the machine makes no errors in that period of time then there is no statistical reason to expect any errors over a longer run.
The normal version of MemCheck is free for all users. There is a pro version which is tuned to the user who checks the quality of ram often, or on multiple machines. It offers options like a "nice" mode which allows you to test ram in the background, during normal use of the machine, as well as more detailed reporting of errors. It also does not pause every time an error is found, so it can be used to determine the overall reliability of ram that is prone to errors, rather than just as a tool that determines if there are any errors at all.
Questions about this product? Visit its online home, at http://hcidesign.com/memtest, or send your question to technical support (memcheck@hcidesign.com)