Corsair Blog - Memtest

In tech support, one of the most common questions we get is “How can I tell if my memory is bad?” Many OS errors that you experience may mention something about your memory or DRAM having a problem — however these errors are not always cuased by faulty memory. In many cases these errors can be generated by your other components such as the motherboard or CPU, or in some cases they can even be a software related issue. The best way to find out if the errors are generated by your memory is to test your memory with Memtest86.

Corsair has long been recognized as having some of the best technical and customer support in our industry and we take great pride in this fact. We use a large variety of tools and techniques to provide these services to our customers. One of these tools is Memtest86+ which can be downloaded here: Memtest86+.

Memtest is a standalone program that requires no operating system to run. It can easily be run from a variety of media including a bootable USB flash drive. A bootable USB flash drive is an extremely useful and versatile tool. Corsair provides a utility users can utilize to make their flash drives bootable. The current version also has Memtest embedded in the installation. The Corsair bootable USB flash tool can be found HERE.

Once you have a bootable USB flash drive, you simply boot your system from the device and Memtest runs automatically. We recommend using the default settings so no setup of Memtest is required. Users have the option of manually selecting their boot device during the BIOS POST process or, they can set the USB device as the first boot device in the BIOS.