[G4] Re: Rember 0.2.2b and MEMTEST

[Richard M. Kriss]

Tony,

Thanks for the note.  I was looking for something for a quick test to let me
if the four DIMMs in my G4 are good and doing their thing. The only DIMM
tester I can recall is the old (OS9) DIMM First Aid that was never updated
to OSX. The new Rember 0.2.2b did what I wanted and did not require me to
mess with a command line user interface.

Memtest may be a better tester; however, I am too lazy to mess with the
doing command line testing using the Terminal interface.  I know how to run
the OSX system maintenance test from the command line but prefer to use
MacJanitor that does the same thing from an OSX interface.

> Why did you only test 1MB? Was it only for the purpose of this
> demonstration?

I only have 1024 MB of memory (4 256K DIMMs). Something tells me we may not
be talking about he same thing?

Thanks for the comments

Dick


On 12/8/04 2:52 PM, "g4-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com"
<g4-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com> wrote:

> Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 17:17:38 -0600
> From: CJ Scaminaci <halogenius at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: [G4] Rember 0.2.2b  a OSX App to test Memory
> To: "A place to discuss Apple's G4 computers."
> <g4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
> Message-ID: <2F7CB325-48A6-11D9-AD3B-000A957A0C02 at sbcglobal.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
> 
> Hello Dick,
> 
> I'm Tony's (the Mac OS X developer of Memtest) son. I aid him in
> development of Memtest and  also run the MemtestOSX website.
> (http://memtestosx.org), I saw this and thought I should throw in a few
> comments.
> 
> We don't recommend its use if you're someone who knows how to run
> command line apps. Rember's GUI and communication techniques to the
> Memtest process are less than desirable. They eat a lot of CPU and
> memory in and of themselves, leaving less for Memtest to test itself.
> Also when I took a look at the Rember source code, a lot of it appeared
> to be chopped out of Apple samples, and contained a lot of OS 9 code
> that was just mucking things up.
> 
> Memory testers aren't good programs to run graphically. Because of the
> complexity of RAM, it's hard to explain here, but you'll find you might
> get MUCH different results if you run Memtest in single user mode, a-la
> documentation suggestion. http://memtestosx.org has documentation and
> the command line version available for download.
> 
> Also nothing that there's a bug in the version of Memtest currently
> incorporated into Rember, that makes it say All tests passed, even when
> they don't. I'm pretty sure he hasn't fixed this, because this print
> out shows an old version number. 4.04M (Rev 2) Command Line fixed the
> bug, but I don't think he saw this.
> 
>> MacOS X (Darwin) running in multi-user mode
>> POSIX version 198808
>> Pagesize is 4096
>> Pagesizemask is 0xfffffffffffff000
>> Requested memory: 1MB (1048576 bytes)
>> Available memory: 647MB (679149568 bytes)
>> Allocated memory: 1MB (1048576 bytes)
>> Attempting to lock allocated physical memory....memory locked
>> successfully
> 
> Why did you only test 1MB? Was it only for the purpose of this
> demonstration? Also note that you can input above the amount of memory
> that is actually free. This is actually a good practice because it
> forces Memtest to scale back and grab inactive memory, thus allowing
> you to test more.
> 
> But long email short, take it from the Mac OSX developer. We recommend
> that you download and run Memtest in Single User mode like the
> documentation states. Rember is an OK alternative for most users, but
> it has many flaws that can cause it to return skewed information.
> 
> -CJ Scaminaci
> http://memtestosx.org