What You Need To Know About Memory Testers

A memory tester isn't a professional who gives you a set of tests to discover how well your memory is doing. Well, not yet anyway. When you look up just what a "memory tester" is, you'll discover that it's a piece of computer hardware that is used as a diagnostic tool in repairing computer memory. It is most likely what Gene Roddenberry was thinking of when he had the computers in Star Trek run "self-diagnostics." This piece of hardware is a geek's dream and is rather pricey (about $1000 US). The software (usually a CD of some sort) is much less expensive.

What's The Point Of It?

If you do a lot of computer repair, you need to know if the computer's memory is damaged or corrupted. The memory tester identifies how much memory is left, what is damaged and often can make repairs to the memory. There are software memory testers which you run through the motherboard, but they take hours to run. A separate piece of memory tester hardware speeds up the process and lasts for thousands of memory checks.

Wait.What's A Motherboard?

A computer's motherboard is the main circuit board, where the mother lode of information is. (Geeks are very tongue in cheek with naming pieces of equipment). This is the main doo-dad that makes the computer go, in other words. Motherboards are called "logic boards" if you have an Apple computer instead of an IBM compatible one, just because Apple has to be different. Anyway, a motherboard is where a computer's main memory is kept, hence a memory tester having to be hooked up or interact with it somehow.

Do you remember the film 2001: A Space Odyssey? Okay - remember the scene where Hal is saying "Dave...stop, Dave.my mind is going, I can feel it." and the really ticked off astronaut Dave is yanking rectangles out of HAL the mad computer? Right - that entire area Dave was floating around in was HAL's motherboard, and Dave was pulling out all of the memory.

So, Do I Need To Buy One?

If you are in the computer maintenance business, yeah, you definitely need a memory tester. If you have a business with a tech support department and a lot of computers working at the same time, consider investing in a memory tester for your poor tech support team. If, however, you are the average person with one or maybe two computers at home, you really don't need to worry about getting a memory tester.


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