I would have to concur but, ALL 5?  What brand are these boards?  Try 
updating the BIOS.  Check the batteries, I've seen extremely weird 
unexplainable behavior in the past.  Keep us posted.

At 06:58 PM 3/4/2004, you wrote:
>Well, it sounds to me like you have issues with the motherboards, not the
>RAM.....
>On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Patrick McCabe wrote:
>
> > I inherited 5 identical computers, Pentium III 800 MHZ. They were used
> > as windows workstations by the company next door that went belly-up. My
> > plan has been to load Linux on them and replace our windows file servers.
> >
> > The problem is that I ran memtest86 and they ALL fail. The memtest
> > documentation talks about false positives, so I thought memtest just
> > didn't play well with this system. I tried loading Linux (Mandrake 9.2)
> > on a few of them. One install complained of a memory problem, but two
> > succeeded and seem to work ok. However, when I copied a .5 gig file
> > across the network, it came across corrupted.
> >
> > How can this be? These computers have been used apparently successfully
> > for at least a couple years. I have tested the memory chips in other
> > systems and they all pass; I have put new memory in these systems and
> > they all fail.
> >
> > Things I have tried so far:
> > -Swap memory chips
> > -Set bios to fail-safe defaults
> > -Twiddle various bios entries that deal with ram
> >
> > Should I just write these guys off, or is there something I can do to
> > fix this?



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