All that said, your memory test program should run without any issues on any
hardware you currently have. Remember to create your bootable CD from the
ISO bootable image prior to attempting to boot from the program to test the
memory.
Thanks to you and Shenan for your reassurances. I know that the ISO
image is independent of the OS -- that's one of the main attractions
for me.
The laptop that is now showing its age (66 months) had bad RAM -- I'm
not sure if it was shipped that way or if the RAM went bad within the
first year. The symptom was BSOD if I ran several programs together,
but no problem if I didn't. I thought it was a Windows issue. When
I ran the memtest.org image it found the exact bad bit in about five
seconds.
So on my new computer, I want to test the RAM before I load anything
critical on there. (I've downloaded the ISO image and will burn it
from a known good computer.) I'll also do a full hard drive scan to
get bad sectors marked before anything is written to them.
I know this is an XP group, so I won't post here about Windows 7,
beyond one comment that might help others getting into Windows 7: I
bought two O'Reilly books, /Windows 7 Up and Running/ and /Windows 7
Annoyances/. I highly recommend the Annoyances book (based on as
much of it as I've read so far, and my very positive experience with
/Windows XP Annoyances/). But IMHO /Windows 7 Up and Running/ was a
waste of money: lots of fluff about included application programs and
how great they are and very, very little practical advice about
configuring the system.