Nobody likes monday mornings, eh?

Well on monday afternoon, I got home to find that rather than rendering 
all day, my PC had stopped with an unusual BSoD message. (0x0000004E)

Anyway, I rebooted it, and it was behaving quite strangely. Since the 

malfunctioning due to overheating.

Yesterday I managed to get the room temperature down to a slightly more 

test... and it almost immediately spews out thousands of errors. So it 
seems my PC now has an actual hardware fault somehow. (!)

What this tells me is that the program wrote some data to memory and 
then read it back, and it wasn't the same. This indicates a fault with 
either the RAM itself, the motherboard, the CPU cache, or just some kind 
of obscure CPU fault that makes it execute instructions wrong.

I tried running tests with the CPU cache disabled, and I still get 
identical errors, which leads me to believe it's not any kind of CPU 
fault. (Which is just as well; I don't imagine anybody still sells 
Socket-939 CPUs...)

Next trick is to start swapping RAM modules and see if that fixes it. I 
don't remember what kind of RAM this sucker takes, but given that even 
obsolete PC-100 RAM is still on sale, it should be possible to replace 
this stuff if that's all the problem is.

I still have no idea how the hell high temperatures would make a RAM 
module go faulty, but there we are... (It's not like we're talking about 


It's a dual-channel system, which presumably means RAM modules have to 
be installed in pairs. (Not sure what happens if you install them singly 
- whether it falls down to single-channel, or stops working completely, 
or what. And I don't imagine for a second that the motherboard manual 
will tell me!) I've got 2 pairs of modules installed, so I might be able 
to isolate it to one of the pairs.

Failing that... I might be upgrading my PC quite a lot sooner than I had 
expected! o_O

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