Can Bad RAM Cause Bad OS?

[akoguiang]

Hey, guys. I posted something a week earlier about getting a blue screen after an hour or so. The RAM was the issue. So, I replaced the RAM with a new pair and no more blue screens! However, the computer still crashes, where the keyboard and mouse become frozen and opening Task Manager become impossible. The only way out was holding the power button and performing a hard reset. Unlike the previous solution with the blue screens, this problem with the hard crashes does not make the computer reboot automatically.

I reinstalled Windows twice with the bad RAM before getting the ones I have now. Should I reinstall Windows with the good ones?

TL;DR Can bad RAM modules cause corrupt operating system, and should I reinstall Windows?

 

[kanewolf]

I would run MEMTEST -- http://www.memtest86.com/ overnight. If everything is clean then do a fresh install of windows. Who knows what file(s) could have been corrupted going through bad RAM.

 

[InvalidError]

Yes, you probably should: OS files may have been corrupted by your bad RAM before getting written to disk, file system structures may also have been corrupted as the OS read, modified and rewrote them to disk. Same goes if you run defragmentation, file copies and various other operations involving reading data from disk and re-writing it.

My Core2Duo got messed up really bad once due to a single bad bit of RAM when I upgraded it from 4GB to 8GB without doing a memtest86 burn-in to see if the memory checked out fine first. (It took five hours of burn-in before the first failure appeared and then I had the failure re-appear only on the same specific test pattern at that specific address but not on every pass.)

 

[Tradesman1]

Yep, as mentioned above files could be corrupt can prob fix that with system file checker - go to the Command Prompt as Administrator and run the command SFC /SCANNOW

 

[Suzuki@1473780084@1473780163]

CPU temperature?

 

[akoguiang]

CPU temperature?

Hi, I've already selected a best answer, but to answer your question, CPU temps never go above 50C when idle (when room temperature is relatively warm).

 

[Suzuki@1473780084@1473780163]

No worries.

May I ask what CPU you're using?

 

[akoguiang]

No worries.

May I ask what CPU you're using?

i5 6600 @3.3GHz