[Rostere]

At first I thought I had gotten infected by a virus when Internet Explorer and Firefox started shutting down randomly during use. Doing a scan with Spybot - S&D would yield lots of errors in detection. I found that booting from my Vista and Win7 partitions (I normally run XP) would cause the classic "DRIVER_IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL" BSOD. So, I take a completely clean HDD, unplug my old ones, and try to install Win7 from a USB stick. Everything seems to work fine but just when Setup would initialize I get the BSOD again. So, I figure the problem might be faulty memory (could the strange behaviour of Spybot be explained by this?) and test my RAM with memtest86+. Lots of errors. So, obviously my RAM is not in good shape.

Could it be that a virus destroyed/infected my RAM somehow? In that case, would it be safe to plug in new DIMMs, and which precautions should I take? I've tried booting the Avira Rescue CD, which hangs up displaying four penguins (at least they look a little like penguins).

Also, you'll have to excuse me for being overly paranoid but I'd really not wish to lose another set of new memory sticks.

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software CANNOT damage hardware. so no, your RAM is probably just bad

[dsenette]

software CANNOT damage hardware. so no, your RAM is probably just bad

[Rostere]

software CANNOT damage hardware. so no, your RAM is probably just bad

So, do you think that Spybot would act the way it did solely because of bad RAM? That would save me a lot of time checking my replaced HDDs for viruses.

[dsenette]

bad ram can/will cause all kinds of errors (like blue screens during windows setup, program instability, etc..) so yeah...it's possible...

you should probably STILL get your drive THOROUGHLY checked out once you get your ram replaced though

Please read the Malware/Spyware cleaning guide here follow the instructions at the top....

That will give you several steps that will help you clean up 70 percent of all problems by yourself. If at the end of the process you are still having difficulty (and you may not be) then post an OTL log in THE MALWARE FORUM forum.
(Posting OTL logs or ANY other logs requested in the malware/spyware cleaning guide in any other forum other than the malware forum is forbidden. If you post any of these logs in any other forum, it will be removed and it will take you longer to get help, so please make sure you only post logs in the malware forum)

If you are still having problems after getting a clean bill of health from the malware expert, please return to this thread..