Why Steam fails

[Scott Ritchie]

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 00:41 -0800, James Liggett wrote:
> 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

Just run memtest86 on the machine overnight.  That'll tell you whether
there's a hardware memory issue or not.

-Scott Ritchie