memtest86 for Inspiron 8600?

memtest has some compatibility issues.
try prime95 http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
hotcpu http://www.7byte.com/hotcpu.exe
i've used hot cpu to test my 512 centon. after a couple hundred iterations i just stopped the test and it showed a report whether you got errors

I don't think memtest86 (all versions even the memtest+) are good for the laptop. Esp. if you have lots of memory to test.
The reason: too CPU intensive, and the test gets really slow really fast (since the fans don't turn on, should the turn on? I don't think the fan control is on at bootup, someone correct me plz)
for example, when I ran memtest86, starting from test 8 (since that is THE test to kill your mem) once I get to test 9 the test slows down to a crawl... Intel has known to throttle the speed of the cpu when it gets too hot (and it gets hot when there is no fan running, so i won't be surprised if my 1.4ghz cpu was actually running at like 400mhz or something.
This is my speculation tho, but to prove to myself that the memories are fine, I tested for 12 hrs using memtest (not memtest86) no problem. Then I Prime95'd my system on blend mode (btw the new version really is STRESSFUL ) for almost 11 hours... And I thought i want to kill my system even more, so I just start running HotCpu (in simultaneous mode) for the last 2hrs...
The memories were fine, the only thing that had problem was the cache ... (reported by hotcpu). But I think it has something to do with me also running prime 95 with a small size of page files (heh, during the test the whole 768mb of sys mem and ~360mb of page file were used, windows definitely didn't like that)
Okay this is getting long winded, so I will just leave at this.

my 2cent

btw. Dell Machina: you know anything about isi pc2700 DDR DRAMs? they passed the torture tests pretty well, and the layout of the mem stick is very different from anything that I have seen (the mem chips are small and spread out...). Got 1Gb of it for $173+5 so don't think it is a bad deal (plus the company is great)

Dell's 32-bit Diagnostics run under DOS and have several memory test built in. If you have a USB Flash drive, you can download the latest version 1232 linked below and boot from the USB drive to execute the diagnostic test.