[Ti] mail.app problem...but different this time

[Kynan Shook]

Perhaps you have bad RAM.  I see it VERY frequently at the AASP where I 
work.  If you added any third-party RAM to your computer, and 
especially if you made your decision on where to purchase based on 
price.  The only place that I ever recommend is Crucial (crucial.com), 
aka Micron.  There are other good manufacturers out there, but they're 
also significantly more expensive.
I'd recommend pulling any extra RAM for a while, do an archive and 
install (not preserving users; your preferences are likely corrupt, so 
you should probably copy all your user data out of the Previous Systems 
folder after the install), and see if the problems come back or not.
Another way to test, if you don't need the computer for a few days, is 
this: before pulling the RAM, open up Activity Monitor as a good 
indicator of whether the computer hasn't crashed (or finished what it's 
working on, either).  Then open up Chess, set the computer's difficulty 
to the highest in the preferences, and start a new computer vs. 
computer game.  Let it run for a day or two, checking on it 
periodically; see if it crashes.  If not, well, this test wont show you 
anything.  If it does crash, note about how much time it took to go (eg 
on the order of minutes, hours, or days).  Pull all the third-party 
RAM, and run the same test.  Hopefully it won't crash; if it does, that 
can sometimes indicate a problem with the processor.

Note, however that there is NO software test (eg Apple Hardware Test, 
TechTool Pro, my little Chess exercise) that will get even close to 
finding all bad modules; I'd guess those catch on average 1 out of 
every 20 bad modules, usually the ones that have massive failures.  The 
ones that just have a few bad bits, or run just a little slower than 
their specification, or have intermittent failures tend to slip by.  
Even the $5000 hardware RAM tester we have at our shop only catches 
maybe 3 of 4 sticks of bad RAM, I'd estimate.

Anyway, if anybody ever wants my personal (and not-so-humble ;-) 
opinion on their third-party RAM, I have developed a sense of how good 
or bad various types or RAM are from testing hundreds (maybe even 
thousands) of sticks of RAM; all I need to do is look at it.  Feel free 
to E-mail photos of any RAM to me.  Make sure I can read the labels, 
and the printing on the chips.  If you have multiple DIMMs, see if the 
chips are all marked from the same manufacturer, otherwise maybe send a 
photo from each stick of RAM.

T Molnar <tam at em.ca> writes:
> My MS word problem the same, why should there be any corruption on
> files which were installed only a week ago?