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In an article published at TG Daily, Microsoft announced that they will recommend that their partners start to incorporate ECC RAM in their systems. I thought this was an interesting announcement on Microsoft’s part, as they have been purposefully vague on the system requirements that they have released, until this point.

I also found it funny that Microsoft went on to blame many of the issues with Windows crashing or programs crashing on bad memory. Non-ECC RAM is in most desktop and laptop computers these days. You will really only find ECC RAM in servers or high end workstations. ECC RAM, for those of you who aren’t really sure, has the ability to correct data errors bit by bit as they are streamed into the RAM circuitry. To accomplish this, there is extra circuitry on the RAM chip. It is generally believed that this extra circuitry decreases performance and slows a system down. Typical users probably wouldn’t notice a difference, but gamers might.

If you want the absolute best in reliability, then ECC RAM is the way to go. Microsoft was quick to point out that if there is a lot of this “low end bad RAM” out there causing these issues with Windows and Windows Applications crashing, then we should move towards ECC RAM before Vista ships. The problem is that ECC RAM costs significantly more than the standard modules in most desktop and laptop systems today.

Well, I just built a new system and know I won’t be running out to purchase ECC RAM any time soon unless they can show me the exact performance increase that I may be able to achieve.

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