Memory diagnostics.

Does anyone know of any free memory test / diagnostic tools? Preferably ones that can be booted from an USB Flash Drive (as opposed to CD or floppy).

Hmmm... memtest86 might do the trick, although I can't remember if a floppy is required.

It certainly finds things others don't seem to, I speak from personal experience on that.

EDIT OF JUSTICE: I just had a poke around, and there's an updated version called memtest86+ which can be made to boot off a USB drive:
http://www.memtest.org/

I use memtest on a CD-ROM, it's proved very valuable in the past.

There's a bootable CD ISO online somewhere with that and a bunch of other utilities on.

I ran memtest86 once, but I decided to give it up when it found nothing after running for close to 28 hours with no indication of how long was left.

[edit] Its called 'Ultimate Boot CD'.

Will it help find the problem to my "Memory Access Violation"s and "Unhandled Memory Exception"? :P.

yeah I got it, it's cool. Useful for my IT consultancy jobs to carry round in the toolbox.

If your really stuck ask around friends/workmates to see if anyone has a Linux CD distro ( generally every linux mag seems to come with one ). Pretty much all of them have a option at bootup to check the memory of your machine. They all seem to use memtest86.

Vista has a memory testing util ;)

Well it seems reasonable it should take Windows ten years to catch up to Linux.

Anyway, much to my surprise it was not a memory issue. It was a nForce driver issue. I am absolutely positively done buying nVidia products.

Being able to write drivers that work is pretty much adamant in the hardware vendor business. Or so one should think.

nVIDIA's drivers are the reason why i changed to ATI (beside of the AA quality). Whenever i had a problem with the pc it was due to their drivers. Since i've changed no more blue screens...

Wow, surprised to hear all the nVidia driver hate, I have similar experiences with ATi drivers. I guess your mileage really does vary.

I haven't had any stability problems with the ATI drivers, but I am using an older version of the catalyst drivers on purpose -- The gamma correction screens on the newer ones are too messy... (The newer versions allow you to specify gamma for red/green/blue seperately, but I haven't seen a way to lock them together -- so unless you can get the curves to allign just right, you can easily get weird colors with the newer drivers.

I've had nV*** cause blue-screens on me before. That was a few years ago though.

I don't always stay current with nvidia driver releases, not since they stopped being able to get 10% or more performance out of my card by just updating the drivers every couple of months (anyone remember the GeForce 2MX's?).

My last upgrade was because I installed Vista and needed something other than the Microsoft default. It hasn't crashed yet.

I can't get any nVidia drivers to install on WinME - just causes BSODs on system start - then again, it's WinME.