I had a stick of RAM go bad in an old Socket 775 motherboard, but since it was one of 6 sticks of RAM, it only affected the PC on rare occasions. That PC was fl

I had a stick of RAM go bad in an old Socket 775 motherboard, but since it was one of 6 sticks of RAM, it only affected the PC on rare occasions. That PC was flaky for years before I pulled out some RAM to upgrade and found the problem had been fixed. When a similar problem occurred on a PC with ECC RAM, I got a warning message saying memory errors had been detected that repeated a few times, then I got a message saying one stick of RAM had been deactivated and that I could keep running. The Dell T3500 dropped from 24 GB to 20 GB and did not even need to be rebooted. That is why I love ECC RAM and Xeon processors. I know if there is a problem and can wait to fix it. I can buy used RAM and processors with confidence that the BIOS self rests will tell me what is good and what is bad.