RAM Management in Vista

[Guest]

Hi

I have a PC with a P4 3.2 HT CPU and 2 Gig RAM, a ATI 1600 (256 meg)
graphics card and Vista Ultimate.

I had some problems with my RAM and was getting errors with Memtest run in
DOS,
I cleaned up the insides of my PC, reseated the RAM sticks and improved the
airflow around the CPU and inside the tower generally.

Now I get no errors after 12 hours of running Memtest and Memscope in DOS
but when I run Memtest for windows I get errors immediatley.

The error message is "Vista is not able to store data correctly in memory"

Is this a Vista problem, since I do not get errors in DOS?

By the way, I do not get any BSOD's or freezing.

thanks

 

[Andrew McLaren]

I had some problems with my RAM and was getting errors with Memtest run in
DOS,
I cleaned up the insides of my PC, reseated the RAM sticks and improved
the
airflow around the CPU and inside the tower generally.
Now I get no errors after 12 hours of running Memtest and Memscope in DOS
but when I run Memtest for windows I get errors immediatley.
The error message is "Vista is not able to store data correctly in memory"
Is this a Vista problem, since I do not get errors in DOS?

Hi Daniel,

Just on teh face of it, I'd suspect the chain of causality is the other way
around - Memscope running on DOS is failing to identify problems, which are
correctly located by Memtest on Windows.

But that's just a guess. I doubt there's any major Vista defect that you are
detecting here; but perhaps these 3rd part tools are having problems running
in the Vsta environment. To date, there haven't been any major bugs reported
in Vista memory management. On the contrary, memory management in Vista is a
sohphisticated evolution of the tried-and-true memory mechanisms used in
Windows NT, Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003. Besides - tools like memtest
are looking for hardware problems so, they shouldn't be so affected by the
underlying OS (you'd think) But Vista introduces new features like Address
Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR), as security and performance enhancements.
ASLR is just an example, there are many other changes as well. A low-level
utility which makes assumptions about memory layout could easily find it has
compatibility problems running on Vista.

If you want to verify your memory hardware, you don't need to run 3rd party
utilities on Vista. You can run the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool, built-in
to Windows Vista. To run the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool:

1. Click Start, click All Programs, and then expand Accessories.

2. Right-click Command Prompt and select Run elevated from the context
menu.

3. At the command prompt, type mdsched.exe. If you are prompted, allow the
action. You can choose to restart the computer and run the tool immediately
or schedule the tool to run at the next restart.

4. Windows Memory Diagnostic runs automatically after the computer restart.
Windows Memory Diagnostic allows you to choose among three test suites of
varying thoroughness.

If you hit F1 and select "Extended" in the memory test menu, this will give
your machine an extremely thorough test. You can optionally select to run up
to 99 iterations (which would probably take a couple of hours to run, on a
typical machine)

Hope it helps,

 

[Guest]

Hi Daniel,

Just on teh face of it, I'd suspect the chain of causality is the other way
around - Memscope running on DOS is failing to identify problems, which are
correctly located by Memtest on Windows.

But that's just a guess. I doubt there's any major Vista defect that you are
detecting here; but perhaps these 3rd part tools are having problems running
in the Vsta environment. To date, there haven't been any major bugs reported
in Vista memory management. On the contrary, memory management in Vista is a
sohphisticated evolution of the tried-and-true memory mechanisms used in
Windows NT, Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003. Besides - tools like memtest
are looking for hardware problems so, they shouldn't be so affected by the
underlying OS (you'd think) But Vista introduces new features like Address
Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR), as security and performance enhancements.
ASLR is just an example, there are many other changes as well. A low-level
utility which makes assumptions about memory layout could easily find it has
compatibility problems running on Vista.

If you want to verify your memory hardware, you don't need to run 3rd party
utilities on Vista. You can run the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool, built-in
to Windows Vista. To run the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool:

1. Click Start, click All Programs, and then expand Accessories.

2. Right-click Command Prompt and select Run elevated from the context
menu.

3. At the command prompt, type mdsched.exe. If you are prompted, allow the
action. You can choose to restart the computer and run the tool immediately
or schedule the tool to run at the next restart.

4. Windows Memory Diagnostic runs automatically after the computer restart.
Windows Memory Diagnostic allows you to choose among three test suites of
varying thoroughness.

If you hit F1 and select "Extended" in the memory test menu, this will give
your machine an extremely thorough test. You can optionally select to run up
to 99 iterations (which would probably take a couple of hours to run, on a
typical machine)

Hope it helps,

Andrew

thanks for the reply, the reason I am looking into the RAM is that I get
very poor Graphics performance with older games with Vista compared to XP.
These games, such as Microsoft Train Simulator are mopre RAM and less
Graphics card dependent.

I will give the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool a go tonight when I get home.

regards