I inherited an older presario system from a friend of my wife. They had gotten a new comp and this one had been plagued with CTDs and BSODs.

After poking around a while I ran memtest on it and sure enough, problems galore. I replace both sticks with Kingston memory, test them (clean) and the rig ran fine for about a month. At that point I started getting random lock ups and reran memtest only to find I was now getting errors on the new memory.

The question is: what could be frying the memory? I'm pretty sure the case is cool enough. I'm not sure how to test whether I'm having power problems.

Any ideas????

Could be the memory card slots. Seen a couple of boards where they were just bad. Or could be a bad PSU. In either case, is it worth it to fix. I would replace the PSU if you have an old one that will work. Those factory PSUs are pretty much junk. They are either good or really bad. Seen several where the fan quits working at certain times, making the PSU temp go through the roof. I've taken a couple apart and rigged the fan to run all the time, fixing the problem. I even strapped a fan on the outside of one once and that did the trick too.

had the same exact problem a few months ago...pretty sure it's the PSU. once i replaced the 4 fried sticks of RAM and got a good, reliable PSU I haven't had a problem since.

I'm thinking PSU as well now.

For the price of a decent one it's worth the upgrade. This is really a pretty decent rig all-in-all and I consider it worth the effort.

Thanks for all the help.