Brand new memory is bad.

[heneyes]

I received my 2gb of Corsair Value Select memory for my notebook. I ran memtest86 and memtest86+ and they both report that the very first byte (address 0) is bad. 🙁 However it is intermittent. Does anything important like OS kernel or software or anything important ever get stored at address 0? Its only one byte, is it a big deal? I would really like your input.

 

[heneyes]

Depending on the length of the test it reports an error at address 0 more than once. If I run the test for an hour or so I may get 5 errors at address 0.

 

[heneyes]

Okay I feel a little better now. You said that memtest will sometimes find a problem with the memory yet there is nothing actually wrong with the memory. Why is that?

 

[Mondoman]

Any error on memtest86+ means something is wrong with your system. As mp says, it might not be the memory per se; it could be the chipset, power supply, etc.
Unlike Corsair's high-quality premium memory lines, their ValueSelect just gets contracted out to the cheapest bidder, and so its quality suffers. Since yours seems to be DOA, just go ahead and return it for replacement under warranty. I'd suggest starting the RMA process via their House of Help RamGuy forum -- there are some stickies there on how to proceed.