The working memory of your computer is its random access memory (RAM). The operating system and programs on your computer are constantly writing and retrieving data from RAM. When you open a web page such as this ONE, for example, your web browser saves it in RAM as you read it. When you start a PC game, it loads data from a slower storage system (such as a hard disc or solid-state drive) into considerably faster RAM.

If your computer's RAM is defective, you may experience issues. When your computer goes to read the RAM, it will consider various data than it saved to RAM. Software crashes, system freezing, blue screens of death (BSODs), file corruption, and other issues can result as a result of this. These programs work by writing data to every sector of your computer's RAM and then recovering it back in a sequential manner. If the utility returns a different result, it means your RAM is bad.

The finest RAM testing software necessitates booting into a separate bootable system. This gets Windows (or some other operating system) out of the way and gives the tool complete access to your RAM at a low level. You can run tools from within Windows, such as HCI Design's MemTest, but they aren't as trustworthy.

• Launch the Windows Memory Diagnostics program. A RAM testing tool is included with Windows. It comes preinstalled on Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, and all other recent Windows versions.

• You can install and use MemTest86 if you need a more CAPABLE testing tool. It runs a larger range of tests and may uncover issues that the Windows test would miss. If you want to try something else, MemTest86+ is a free and open-source program. Both of these programs are self-contained and bootable. You can copy a USB image from MemTest86 to a USB disc. To make a bootable USB drive, SIMPLY run the EXE file provided with the download as well as provide a spare USB drive. Restart your computer once you've made bootable MEDIA and instruct it to boot from the USB device where you copied the memory test tool.