Why Steam fails

[James Liggett]

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 03:24 -0500, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
> I think hardware problems with the RAM are highly unlikely. I've had 
> plenty of those, and when your RAM is defective, nothing works - you get 
> spurious kernel panics, and you  will find out that it's defective 
> really soon.
Well, that might be true most of the time, but not always. Case in
point: a while back I was helping a friend of my brother's build a
computer. We loaded Windows XP and a couple games on it (Half-Life, Max
Payne, a few others which I can't remember) Things seemed to work fine.
Then we tested the games. Everything except HL hard-locked the machine.
It drove us nuts all night trying to figure it out. The next day the guy
swapped out his ram (for reasons I can't explain) and things worked
fine. It just goes to show that sometimes it can be what you least
expect... ;-) I wish I could shed a little more light on your plight
though. I wish you the best of luck :)

James