I know this won't help the original poster right away, but I'm wondering if what's needed is a memory test that not only spins through the memory but also does DMA transfers back and forth to a disk, and/or other similar functions. It might also be useful to have a second thread exercising the cpu core(s) to "heat things up". These are some of the things different between running memtest86 and running the OS and doing "something". -- Dave K Unix Systems & Network Administrator Mount Laurel NJ