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19/08/2004 |
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Memory Testing, Pt 2, DocMem Don Bradbury looks at another free RAM testing program
If you want a quick tester for the physical memory in your computer you could do much worse than try DocMem. Like MemTest which we looked at recently, the program is a free download. It installs to a bootable floppy, and it runs under its own disk operating system (FreeDOS). The 300K DocMem20.exe self-extracting executable downloads quickly to your Windows Desktop (or wherever you choose). Double clicking on it extracts a series of files. You’ll probably want to copy the archive file to its own dedicated folder on your hard disk for safe keeping before you do this, but all of the extracted files are automatically put on the boot floppy you supply, and from which the tests are run. A menu then lets you choose to create the bootable floppy disk.
All of the configuration that most users would require are offered, the tests run without user intervention, and at the end you can choose to print the results or save them to disk for future reference. Conclusion DocMem worked admirably for me, and for a free utility you wouldn’t complain over any aspect of it. The tests are simple to carry out, they run without assistance from the operator, and options to save the results are adequate. What more could you ask? |
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Restart
the computer with the floppy in the drive, and then select whether
you want to do a full burn-in test of your memory or carry out a
quick check. The latter, on a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB of memory,
took 10 minutes to complete, so that would detect a major memory
failure within a reasonably short time.
If,
on the other hand, you have a suspected intermittent fault (not so
uncommon), or if you want to soak test a new PC, say overnight, you
would opt for the burn-in tests where repeat test cycles are far
more likely to detect any problem – which might only show when the
chips are hot.