On Thursday, 25 September 1997 the Space Shuttle lifted off to rendezvous with the Mir Space Station in the seventh Shuttle mission of 1997 with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis on Mission STS-86 and on this flight, Qualitas RAMexam went along having been selected by the Mission Operations Directorate Stealth Labs at NASA for use on the Mir Space Station. We're very pleased to participate in this historic venture as the premier memory checker on land and now in outer space!

For those of us ground-based users of computers, we hope we don't see computer Random Access Memory (RAM) failure, but in outer space it is expected -- the question is not if, but when.

As on the ground, but even more so in the hostile environment of outer space, RAM is subject to many environmental factors -- some we can control, some we can't. In space we expect the main problem to be particle radiation, cosmic rays, etc. because the Mir Space Station is not shielded by the protective layer of the Earth's atmosphere. That's where RAMexam comes in. How often the DRAMs in the IBM 760ED laptop fail is the question RAMexam is expected to answer.

For this purpose, RAMexam has been specially modified to run in this environment so as to give the memory time to fail by pausing for a user-specified amount of time between each test. In this way, RAMexam can maximize the possibility that it'll catch the memory failing.

Depending upon the results of running RAMexam in outer space, we have more changes planned for the product including enhanced logging, continuation of memory tests after failure, and for when the memory failure is permanent (rather than transient) excising the failing memory from the physical address space so you can continue running without danger of the failing RAM being used!

In the meantime, although your RAM might never orbit the Earth, it can still fail, so get your copy of the memory tester selected by NASA.

Electronic version with on-line docs is available for immediate delivery for the low price of $24.00. Buy now!

If you have more questions about RAMexam, please send us a message at .

To read about another fine software product with a head start on us in the software-circling-the-globe business, see http://www.grc.com/mir.htm.

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