Can a program mess up your RAM?

[xotrem]

Last night I was playing Dragon Age 2 and my computer suddenly restarted on its own. It came back with a blue screen and mentioned an error with ataport.sys. Then my monitors shut down and I couldn't get any kind of life through them, not even a flicker. I had an old video card I tried to make sure it wasn't that since the issue with the monitors. Not the problem. Swapped the drives to a different SATA port, nothing. Finally I took the RAM out and started individually testing sticks. Bingo! My question is this:

Can a program have some kind of fault that can blow a piece of RAM or is it just coincedence in timing? I played through the game once before completely and it caused a random restart, but the system recovered with no issues, but with it restarting again like this, it just made me curious. My system has never done that on any other software.

[ayako]

Its coincidence.

Send me your minidump.

C:\Windows\Minidump

[Nellah]

Sounds like it was an instability that was already in your computer that the game exposed and pushed to the failure point. At least it was memory and not power supply, when those things go it can be... expensive.

[Tyrianth]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: A poorly coded program could fuck it up in numerous ways, most commonly would probably be improper garbage collection. That being said it wouldn't cause any physical damage to your RAM, a quick restart and you'd be fine.

[holyforce]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: A poorly coded program could fuck it up in numerous ways, most commonly would probably be improper garbage collection. That being said it wouldn't cause any physical damage to your RAM, a quick restart and you'd be fine.

not getting rid of those pesky pointers :P
or not .dispose();

[Deleted]

. At least it was memory and not power supply, when those things go it can be... expensive.

indeed as well I can vouch for, Bad PSU took out motherboard, Graphics card and processor :/
Least it gave me an excuse to upgrade to a brand new system

as for programs causing a BSOD, then yes its possible, usually a quick reset will fix it with no damage caused, however if you have been overclocking your ram for any reasons this can cause permanent damage. if you have been OC'ing then I would suggest you drop into your bios and run everything at stock speeds for a while to ensure that you havent damaged anything.

there are also various progroms you can use to test your ram to make sure none of it is faulty, http://www.memtest86.com/ is one such program which I use from time to time when fixing peoples machines for them.

[vesseblah]

Can a program have some kind of fault that can blow a piece of RAM or is it just coincedence in timing? I played through the game once before completely and it caused a random restart, but the system recovered with no issues, but with it restarting again like this, it just made me curious. My system has never done that on any other software.

It's more likely that the faulty RAM caused your bluescreens in the first place, games can not physically break memory.

On the other hand improper overclocking can easily destroy RAM if you put voltage too high.