Phew! The memory diagnostic tool didn't find anything, but about an hour ago I got a BSOD alerting me to a memory parity error, which means it's definitely a bad DIMM. I'm currently running with just one in an effort to diagnose where the problem lies. Hopefully it's the 1GB DIMM and not the 2GB one.

It's been running all day today, which is why I've been using my old laptop (with 512MB of RAM, ugh). It hasn't found anything yet, but people tell me that it can take 24 hours or more to turn up an error.

Yeah, why don't you run memtest on it to know for sure?

The Office Depot Sucks for Buying a Laptop. (Google should jump on this pretty quickly, I think! We are making a difference.)

I am thinking of buying an MP3 player locally, just to like, have it instantly. That can be a pretty big appeal. It's the one thing Internet purchases can't give us. Er, unless you're buying a direct download game. Or direct download music. You know what I mean.

Sucks man, hope it is just the RAM. I have actively been avoiding getting RAM because the thought of doing the work to figure out what kind I have and what kind my old motherboards can take has seemed like a horrible use of time.

On Thursday, July 10th, I bought an Acer Extensa laptop from Office Depot to replace my ailing Toshiba Satellite from 2005. The specs are pretty respectable: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 3GB RAM, 160GB 7200rpm HD. The only bottleneck is the Intel GMA X3100 integrated video card, but since I don't play any games newer than like 2004 anyway it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I installed Windows XP and it went okay for a while, until I started getting bluescreens like crazy. I think I've gotten something like nine in the two weeks since I bought the machine. I used WinDBG to read the crash dumps, and it seems that the culprit is either the processor or a bad stick of RAM. The RAM is fixable enough since that shit costs like a nickel right now, but if it's the processor then I basically have anywhere from a week to six months before this thing becomes a paperweight.

I would just take it back to Office Depot and exchange it, thus saving me all the headache of diagnosing the exact cause of the problem, but apparently their return policy on laptops says that I have to return it within 14 days of purchase. So, basically, attempting to figure out the problem myself made it impossible to get any sort of service from Office Depot.

Thanks, guys. I'll definitely be buying my next laptop from you and also telling everyone I know to do the same.