Damn, am I angry about myself of what!?

I spent nearly a week fiddling around with my new “DOS/Windoze retro workhorse” (a newer version of the Compaq Deskpro 2000). Setting up/moving DOS was a piece of cake and so I went on to install NT 4.0 which is the most recent (sic!) version of Windows supported by INMOS tools as well as it’s the favorite weapon of choice of Michael of transputer.net, so it’s wise to have it handy if you like to play around with his latest creations.

I stopped counting how many times I installed NT in different versions, languages and service packs. It constantly crashed, BSODs mostly hinting towards filesystem errors. So I swapped the drive – 3 times. Each time formatting, creating partitions for DOS etc…
Just today, in total desperation I tried Win XP and finally I got an error message which rang a very silent bell in the back of my head: “PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA” – this steered me away from possibly faulty drives and filesystems… towards RAM.

Blindly following my rule not to leave any socket empty, I stuffed that little machine to the brim. Replacing the ‘bad apple’ fixed it all. NT4SP6 is running like a charm – happy dance. Fine.
What really nags me about that is that I would have suspected RAM issues much earlier some years ago – it was a reflex, an instinct back then. MemTest86 was a trustworthy companion all days.

Are you loosing nerd-instincts too while piling new knowledge on old skills?