I am posting this in the hardware section because I think it is hardware related, but I am not sure. I just installed some new RAM in my laptop the other day. I went from 2 x 512 MB to 2 x 1 GB. Ever since then, games like SuperTux and my MP3s skip whenever I do things like open a program or scroll down a page. But all my other games show no sign of this skipping. It never did this before. Also, whenever I first boot up, there are weird distortions in the log on screen and wallpaper, but if I open a fullscreen game, it goes away. I suspected the RAM, and I kind of do still but I am not sure.

When I first installed the RAM, my laptop would not POST. I removed one stick and then the other, and both worked fine, so I put both back in, and it booted fine. But then I noticed the distortions in the colors. They were in wavy lines. But then they went away when I opened SuperTux. But that was skipping like a CD player when you shake it, as were all my MP3 files. I checked the CPU to make sure nothing was using it up, and the CPU usage was low and it wasn't spiking. I rebooted and ran Memtest86 for an hour and it reported no errors, so I figured maybe it was a glitch. But the distortions happen every time I reboot.

I will swap back in my old RAM in the mean time to see if it does it with that. The RAM I bought had lower latencies, so I think It may be unstable. I will also run memtest overnight. In the meantime, what do you guys think? The RAM seems like a likley culprit, but I don't see how that would make music and games skip. And everything else works fine. I would like some opinions on if this may be a fixable issue or if I should RMA the RAM.

Thanks,
BigFoot.

When you have more than 1go in Linux you should verify if your kernel support this.. try to check what the amount of memory report `cat /proc/meminfo` if memtest86 report no errors, it's because it's only a software problems. if cat /proc/meminfo doesn't report 2048mo of memory try to compile a new kernel from source.. these is some good howto on google... Verify that you have support for large memory

Thanks for the response. Should I be typing something into the console? I'm not sure how to check.

Oh BTW i am using the Ubuntu K7 Kernel (2.6.15-27-k7)

for check your ram exec `cat /proc/meminfo` in the first line it should have "MemTotal: 2058332 kB" or something near of that... if not.. you must dl last kernel. It's 2.6.19.1 as today! just follow these commands:
mkdir /usr/src/kernel
cd /usr/src/kernel
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kern...6.19.1.tar.bz2
ln -s linux-2.6.19.1 ../linux
cd linux-2.6.19.1
make xconfig
<Make you configuration..... more large ram amount..>
make bzImage && make modules
as root:
make modules_install && make install
<if you have grub installed>
nano -w /boot/grub/grub.conf
<add a line like this.. for exact line check the other one>
title=kernel 2.6.19.1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.19.1 root=/dev/sda2
#this assume that your root is first hdd first partition..

correction first hdd second partition....

I checked, and it gave me 1943064 which would make sense since some RAM is used for video memory. I will try the latest kernel I have in the GRUB menu. I am using this older version because it is the latest K7 kernel.

It wasn't the kernel, but I did get an idea that eventually fixed it. I figured I would try the 386 kernel because it was the 2.6.17 version. I booted that up, and it worked. And then I booted back into the K7 kernel and that worked too. Odd. It must have been a glitch. I have also noticed a big performance increase now Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it.