On 12/01/2014 19:06, SteveW wrote:

Most BSODs that I've had have turned out to be faulty hardware drivers,
mostly video card ones, and the others to badly written programmes or HD
corruption. I've never yet had one that could be traced to faulty memory.

I have, on three different machines.

On the first, Win NT ran, crashing once or twice a day, but otherwise
okay. I needed USB support for something and tried to install Win ME,
which would not even get past the installer (Win 98 would, but crashed
every half hour or so). A memory test proved one stick of memory faulty.
Replacing it cured the problem.

Years later, on the other two machines, both running the same
motherboards, same processors and same memory but different version of
Windows (Vista and 7) , first one stick and then the other of each
failed - again the machines became crash prone, a memory check showed
the fault and removing the faulty stick cured the problem until the
other stick went faulty a few months later. Replacing the memory has
kept both machines running (one is now running Windows 8 and I am using
the other to try out Zentyal).

Ditto on various servers - reseating or replacing memory has helped a
few times.