On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:10:38 -0400, kony wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:40:41 -0500, rebuildapc@lovethepc.org
> wrote:
>
>>I was just wondering if a boot sector virus or some other piece of malware
>>could be spread to the ram chips.
>
> Yes, when the bios loads it'll load that virus into main
> memory.
>
> HOWEVER, once you turn off the system, that volatile memory
> is empty again. Nothing permanent happens to it from a
> virus/etc.
>
>>It might be a silly question, but it's
>>hard to find this ram other than through used dealers, or to pay top dollar
>>at the retailers.
>
>
> More likely is it was damaged somehow, buy it from someone
> with good feedback or even better, avoid
> top-dollar-retailers AND ebay, and look for discounts at
> popular online stores like http://www.newegg.com et al.

I can understand a situation where the O.P. would want to buy used RAM
rather than new. I have an older PC that was built for RDRAM (doh!) and
rather than becoming popular and cheap, this type of RAM is rare and
expensive. If I want to upgrade my RAM capacity for this machine, I
definitely would go for used RAM, from someone tossing out a similar
machine. Likewise, I can imagine that people upgrading from DDR to DDR2
based machines may have a lot of RAM that they no longer could use, and a
lot of this would be in perfect shape.