My laptop was suffering from intermittent crashes, leading me to suspect some of my laptop’s memory was bad. So I went Googling for answers.
Windows has a Windows Memory Diagnostic tool that scans your memory for you. To use it, you need to create either a floppy or CD that contains the bootable diagnostic program and boot directly to the program. Since my laptop has no floppy drive, I needed to do the CD option. Luckily the Windows program can also create an ISO image to burn to CD (unlike every other memory-testing program out there).
Now, I did not have CD burner software that handled ISO images, but the page conveniently pointed me to the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools which includes the cdburn.exe command line tool. I downloaded and installed the resource kit. Then I just typed cdburn f: windiag.iso (replace f: with whatever your CD burner drive letter is) and it created the CD.
I booted from CD and the program ran itself. Even with a GB of RAM (2GHz processor) it tested everything in under 10 minutes. The program even told me that all errors occurred on one memory module. I took one of the memory sticks out, and still got errors. That was it! I ran the program again on the other memory just to be safe, but as expected there were no errors.
Memory errors are one of the hardest things to figure out, but this tool made it easy (and free). I will definitely keep this program around.