I have a machine at work that sometimes on cold boot (sitting overnight) runs through its POST routine. After it detects all of the drives as a good little computer should, it sometimes gives the error message, "Memory test fail." I thought this may be something with the ram, but not sure. I switched the Ram in that machine w/ another computer of identical hardware/software. It did not give the same memory test fail message in that machine. I replaced the ram back in the original machine and no problems either. This particular computer seems to just have these problems usually on cold boot. Any help is appreciated. I am pretty sure it is the ram. Please tell me if you have had a similar problem and what you did to deal w/ it.

You might try replacing the cmos battery. Sometimes a low battery can cause some screwy things to happen such as this. Hope this helps!

That is a good idea. Does it explain the fact that it only does this when it is coldbooting?

Not really. But I have seen stranger things happen from a bad cmos battery. Did you try different memory in the original machine. It could be (hopefully not) a case of a bad motherboard. If different memory causes the same results you can rule out bad memory and narrow it down to the computer.

Today something else happened when I started that computer. The computer has 128 MB ram (2x64MB simms). It detected only 16MB twice. I then switched the ram places in the slots and it detected the full 128MB. Thats really wierd. I am going to guess that my other problem will come back. It seems to come and go. Thanks for your help Jason.

Did you ever figure out what it was Jeff? My computer is doing the exact same thing...if you can figure it out, please email me...thanks.