PC Support | Velocity Micro

Estimated difficulty and completion time: up to several hours depending on amount of RAM, low to moderate difficulty.

If you suspect that your RAM is going bad there is a handy utility called Memtest86 that will test all the memory in your system and tell you how many errors it finds. It’s fairly easy to install and run, and once it’s running can continue without any more input until it’s done.

Generally speaking, as RAM gets older, it’s going to have more and more errors, but won’t always result in system instability. But if Memtest86 finds several dozen or even several hundred errors, then you will definitely want to consider replacing some of your RAM.

To use Memtest86 you will need an empty thumb drive of at least 512MB capacity. Download Memtest86 onto your systems preferred storage drive. Un-zip the folder and run the application “imageUSB.” Once “imageUSB” is running select the USB you would like to use in the top section of the window and click write in the bottom left-hand section of the window. This may take up to a couple minutes while it formats and writes your USB. Once complete, restart your computer. You can just leave the thumb drive plugged in to the computer for the entire process. Once your computer has started rebooting and you see the Velocity Micro logo, start pressing the boot menu key for your motherboard (F8 for Asus, F12 for Gigabyte, F11 for MSI and ASRock and F7 or F10 for Laptops) and select the thumb drive from the popup list.

NOTE: You may see 2 options on your thumb drive, one that says “UEFI” partition 1 and "UEFI" partition 2. You can choose either partition 1 or 2.

Memtest86 will automatically boot up and ask if you want to change any testing parameters before it begins. It’s safe to leave everything as default and simply wait a few seconds and let it start itself. Memtest86 will automatically start running and depending on how much RAM you have in your system it may take a few hours. We’d recommend letting it run overnight so that it doesn’t interfere with your work. On the bottom section of the display, you will see how many errors Memtest86 has found so far. Once the test has finished, it will give you the final count of errors found. Write down or take a picture of that number and contact our support team for further assistance. If Memtest86 does not detect any errors, then there may be other issues with your system that are causing instability.