Memory prices are really coming down. Three months ago we paid about $80 per gigabyte for the one-gigabyte sticks. The two-gig sticks were more than double that–$175 or so. Last week we ordered some two-gig sticks to upgrade a couple of machines. We paid about $80 each, with shipping. One-gigabyte memory sticks are now available for under $35.

I installed the eight gigabytes into my machine and started getting intermittent failures–usually resulting in a hard system crash. That’s always fun. A quick Google search revealed Microsoft’s Windows Memory Diagnostic: a standalone memory testing program. To use it, you download the program from that page and run it to create a boot diskette or an ISO image that you can use to burn a bootable CD. The memory test program starts immediately when you boot the system with that diskette or CD.

The program works, and pretty darned quickly on the machine in question–a 2.4 GHz Pentium Core 2 Duo. But it has its quirks. First of all, it’s apparently a 32-bit application, as it won’t access more than four gigabytes of memory. Microsoft really needs to update their program. 64-bit Windows has been available for more than two years. A worse problem is that the program reports that I have more than 4 gigabytes of memory in the system when I install two 2-gig memory modules. So some memory, somewhere, doesn’t get tested. I had to test each of the 2-gig modules individually in order to make sure that everything got tested.

Memory Diagnostic did find the bad memory module, so I’m happy. And I’ll keep that CD around. We’ve purchased a lot of memory in the last few months, and have had trouble with some of it. I think we’re going to start testing the modules first thing, before dropping them into a machine.