[olug] Installfest & RSVP

[Daniel Linder]

>Jeff Hinrichs wrote:
>> Maybe some knoppix cds?  After reading the MDK article on /. last night
[snip]
>> -Jeff

Timothy "Irish" O'Brien wrote:
> Always bring some Knoppix CD's! Always! It is a superb tool - great with
> the auto discovery of devices, and you can install it to the local HD.

And another good tool to have around is the Memtest86
(http://www.memtest86.com/) utility.  If you grab a Gentoo CD, it is one
of the boot options, or you can make a bootable diskette with the binary. 
It is a totally stand-alone binary -- no OS, only needs ~80-120K (K!!!)
bytes of RAM to run.

I was having problems installing Windows XP on my mother-in-laws computer
over Thanksgiving weekend.  It would fail at really random times during
the install.  I finally broke down and ran Memtest86 overnight(note1) and
it found a couple bad spots in the stick of RAM I had put in earlier. 
Once I took it out, the system installed like a charm.

Dan

note1: The quick test on this system -- Duron 1.6GHz, 128MB RAM -- took
about an hour.  The intensive test of RAM took overnight.  Thankfully the
quick test found the error for me over lunch! :)