My computer just randomly crashed. In the same way as the old computer that it cannibalized and replaced, that is. · 4:09am Mar 28th, 2017
In a very creepily similar way to the computer that preceded it.
When I first built my current PC, I ended up cannibalizing my old PC for parts, placing the RAM, GPU, and Hard Drives into my new computer.
Just a few minutes ago, my new PC crashed.
What made it creepy was that my old PC crashed almost daily in the exact same way-- all sound becomes frozen, and the mouse remains responsive for a couple seconds longer, before freezing as well. The image immediately freezes on the screen, and the computer's hard drive spins down to 0% activity, no matter what was happening moments before.
During this time, the computer is completely unresponsive to everything except for the reset button on the front of the case. When rebooted, it acts as if nothing had ever gone wrong, and continues to work well until the next random crash.
I read up on the potential cause of the crashing, and it seems to be a hardware-related fault tying into the RAM installed in the computer, in a process known as "bit-flipping". During a bit-flip, a process or multiple processes may change the state of memory addresses in the chip rapidly enough to influence or even "bit-flip" the values of nearby surrounding memory addresses, causing memory to become corrupted, and destroying recently accessed memory that hasn't been saved to permanent storage.
I believe that the RAM that I took from my old PC is the root of the problem, and since I have a second, newer stick installed, the older stick might've been susceptible to the bit-flipping bug. Taking into account that I was watching four Youtube videos concurrently while working on homework, I'm pretty sure that the sheer amount of memory usage allowed my computer to overflow from the first bank of RAM, (the newer stick) directly into the older one. (The older stick). I'm not entirely sure if that's how Windows 10 manages and uses RAM, but based on my studies on how OS's typically access them, (moving to higher and higher addresses as memory is used), then it may be quite possible that it was due to memory becoming corrupted after an overflow into the address space of the older RAM.
Either that, or my old PC has now possessed my new one, and cursed it with crashes. 
