If you bench/burn/test your memory within windows DO NOT SHUT DOWN NORMALLY!!

Ok, this is HIGHLY IMPORTANT to those that bench/burn/test their memory within windows. I have learned this the hard way, and do not wish for others to suffer the fate i did, so here it goes:

IF YOU TEST YOUR MEMORY HEAVILY WHILE IN WINDOWS, AND/OR IF YOU OVER-STRESS YOUR MEMORY WITHIN WINDOWS AND SHUT DOWN NORMALLY, YOUR PROFILE WILL GET CORRUPTED.

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Apparently, windows saves profile information onto ram at all times, while this would make sense for performance purposes, it dosent make sense at all in terms of consistency and integrity.

I also found out that profile information is only saved and loaded at Boot and Shutdown Times.

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Meaning if your profile info in your ram gets corrupted in any way, it will save the corrupt profile back to disk upon shutdown, and when you reboot you will have lost your profile.

There following are the ways by which it is possible to corrupt the profile on-the-fly:

1- If you tweak your ram past its limits (ie high fsb or tight timings, too little or too much voltage) , to the point where it starts corrupting information.

2- If you heavily stress the ram via Benchmark/Burn-In/Test while in windows. Some (very rarely) memory -cleaning- or -optimizing- programs will sometimes do this.

3- If you otherwise stress the ram through extreme multitasking or other means of extreme memory usage.




On to the good and bad news, which one do you want first

The bad news: Unfortuenately, once you loose your profile, there is not much you can do to get it back unless you have a backup =(


The Good news: There is a solution to keeping your profile! It would require prior knowlege that you might have lost your profile.


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The solution:

If you feel that your profile info stored on ram has been corrupted, you can save it by doing the following:

please note: I do not recommend you do this in any other situation. ONLY do this if you suspect you may have corrupted your profile.

When you are ready to turn off the computer, whatever you do DO NOT SHUT DOWN NORMALLY!

Shutting down normally will save your corrupt profile onto disk, obliterating your profile, and forcing you to start anew!


You must first wait for all hard-drive activity to cease, listen closely for hard-drive noises, once the harddrive stops making any noise, reach around the back of your computer, and flip the on/off switch on your Powersupply.

If you do not have a powersupply switch, yank the powersupply cord. If (in case of REALLY OLD computers) you cant do that, then simply unplug the computer from the wall outlet.


If you are following me, you understand that by doing this you skip the default windows task to save the profile to disk before shutdown, therefore preserving your working copy on disk!



I hope others learn from my mistakes =)

hmmm....

as bad as that probably is for the rest of the components in the computer, i see his point. I've lost plenty a profile and next time i'm overclockin and pushing my ram... i'll remember this

Or you use an image program... like I want to.
But not this Windows, I'll reinstall within the week. I've never heard of that, thank you, blackjackel!

I usually just unplug my computer anyways, but thanks.

Would this apply to memory that has been tested stable with memtest? Usually I make sure the memory can pass at least an hour or so of memtest before booting into windows. While I realize an hour isn't a full stability run, I feel safe booting windows at this point.

Hehe, I think this happened to me. I'm running Windows 2000 Pro and whenever I log into Administrator it gives me an error saying "Explorer.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows. An error log has been created". Then it tries to re-open explorer and errors out again. It's a never ending, unstoppable cycle. I was able to log into another account on my computer, and make anther admin account that I could use until I figured it out. So does that mean the profile is corrupted? If so I'm going to make another account called "overclock" and use that when I'm testing overclocks. That way if it gets corrupted, no problem. Good idea? I've been trying to figure this out, and I think this is what happened. So thanks for the info.

never had this, but likely cause I push it to the point of having to remove incoming acv
best to figure out the backup thing, thanks