Repairing data archive and other problems

For the past few months I have randomly been getting the "a serious error has occured message" and or "repairing data archive". I looked into it and did what I thought was the solution, I deleted the .DAT and did a -image. I start it up again..."repairing data archive". Other programs are also crashing like flash player and IE. What I think might be the problem is the additional RAM I purchased from fry's electronics was faulty.

Is there any way I can test this?

Or am I not even close to being right?

I think you're really close to right if not right on, I have a parts PC and on occasion I use it for GW, thing is this old PC has 3 different RAM chips and they work....but they do the things you describe, random crashing on all apps including games, GW starts up 2/10 times repairing data archive and sometimes on a blue moon it won't just crash the game but the operating system as well.

I took out 2 RAM chips and ran the matching sticks and voila no problems of any sort.

Yes, there are ways to run a memory test. I'm going to assume you're using Windows:

When your system starts up, loads from BIOS, and then begins to load up your operating system, hit the F8 key. It will come up to a menu of options. One of them should be an option to run a memory test. If I am mistaken, someone please correct me. I've been using strictly Linux for the last 6 months and am starting to forget things about Windows.

Guild Wars is pretty on top of debugging. The error message that pops up on your web browser should give you some general details on potential problems. If the memory test comes up clean, try removing your memory and see if the problem continues.

What I did was I added 2 sticks of 512MB to my prexisting 2 sticks of 256MB, so if I run it on 1G instead of 1.5G it should work?

The point is to have matching RAM sticks correct?

Sometimes RAM doesn't mix well. Pull out the 2x256 MB sticks and put the 512 MB in the first RAM bank.

If you want to test the RAM try this tool: Memtest86

Download the bootable CD-Image, burn it and boot from the CD. A full test will run several hours.

The built in BIOS-Memtest is rubbish and will not detect most of the problems.

Irkm