I can cite working professionally with PC's and other hardware from 1984. I've never seen any system becoming cured by defrag, but for more times I can recall the culprit has been a memory chip. Also, a "rotting" memory chip will render any other attempts at troubleshooting a guesswork as the rate and physical location (reflected as the address) of errors on a bad memory chip varies greatly, and the experimenter may develop wrong notions about the cause and effect in his case.
The Memtest tool is easy to use: leave it on for a night. If you get a clean bill of health, your main memory subsystem & CPU cache are ok. Then proceed to system software checking.
Last edited by DBTL; 11th June 2006 at 17:45.