Hi Simon31,

Welcome to the community.

It can be an issue with the memory slots on the motherboard as well. However in order to isolate the issue, we would need the error codes that you got while running the test. Please let me know the error codes that you got while running the test.

Let me know in case there are any other concerns. Glad to be of assistance.

DELL-Chiranjeev S

Social Outreach Professional

You can reach us at http://en.community.dell.com/

Thank you for responding.

I run Metest from a bootable CD and it never fails in the same place twice. Last night I ran three tests: the first simply froze during Test 1 without giving any errors. I am attempting to embed screenshots of the other two failures in this message.

The Dell diagnostic partition, did not give any errors yesterday when I was collecting screenshots. Nevertheless, it does sometimes fail too and does not always fail in the same place.

Hi Simon31,

Thank you for your reply. In this case I would suggest you to release the static power and then reseat (unplug and re-plug) the memory chips.  

Please try following steps to release the static power-

Remove the AC Adapter as well as the battery. Then press and hold down the power button for 10 seconds.

Once done, use the following link to reseat (unplug it and plug it back again) the memory chips-

<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

Let me know the findings. Glad to be of assistance.

DELL-Chiranjeev S

Social Outreach Professional

You can reach us at http://en.community.dell.com/

Reseating the memory did not help - indeed replacing the memory did not help either.

I have now replaced the motherboard and MEMTEST runs without errors. So that problem is solved. However, the system still freezes so I guess that wasn't caused by the memory problems!