My circa-20002011 XPS9100 (5DN3X A00 motherboard) has been a model of stability until this month. (Background: I updated its BIOS; the upgrade went smoothly, except I couldn't get the PC to recognize my boot SSD. Off it went to the repair shop. It came back all fixed up, except for a glitch or two over the past two weeks.)
Then today, the PC froze with video corruption. I was unable to run it reliably. Its integrated memory diagnostic showed there was a memory problem. Troubleshooting with memtest86 using every possible combination of my 3 modules in the first bank (slots 1 thru 3), I established that:
- If I inserted all 3 modules in any order, memtest86 would freeze after 7 seconds.
- If I inserted any 2 modules in any order and slot combination, memtest86 would reboot after about 10 seconds.
- If I inserted only one module, memtest86 would run for a while regardless which module or slot was used. (I stopped after a minute. I'll run an extended test overnight.)
This showed that all 3 modules were good, all 3 slots were good, but my PC could not support more than one module at a time.
What should be my next step?
Update 2015/11/16: My Memtest86 CD was a few years old. When I ran the newest version of Memtest86, even with all 3 slots populated, no errors were detected in over a day of test iterations. Let's assume my problem was a false positive.
