Memtest-86 not being consistent

[nrogers64]

I have a Dell Precision M65 laptop that has been acting up a lot lately. I had Windows 7 RC on it and was getting blue screen after blue screen, so I wiped the hard drive and installed XP Pro, but it, too, got blue screens. It seemed to happen at random times. I tried to think of what each blue screen instance had in common, but they all seemed to be unique. This led me to think that perhaps the RAM has gone bad.

I ran Memtest-86 (which I'm new to and very unfamiliar with) and these are the results of the first time I ran it:




As you can see the test only lasted 24 seconds. I'm not really sure what to make of the results, though. I tried pressing escape to exit, but nothing happened, so I held down the power button to turn off the laptop. I then started running Memtest-86 again. So far it's been going for 20 minutes. It says pass 49%, test 33%, test #7. What does this all mean?

Thank you!

[patio]

Memtest runs in cycles and there are 8 or 10 different tests....
It does not stop until you end it but you ended it prematurely...
Best thing to do is let it just run for approx. 2 hours and then check to see if there are ANY errors at all.
Errors mean bad RAM.

PS. It will appear like it is hung in certain tests...just let it do it's thing.