[ale] Memory or Software?

[Scott Castaline]

Can anybody tell me whether I'm experiencing a software bug or if it's a 
hardware issue?

I've noticed that certain functions over a period of time stop working 
or become erratic. It became very noticeable with Songbird where 
intermittently my "Last Played" Date/Time would be blank, even though 
the track had played. If I restarted Songbird it would display correctly 
for a while and then start again. It seems almost like a heat related 
problem as it intensifies the longer the system is on. On first morning 
boot, all is well, but later the problem comes to play.

I've had also for a while, but never thought too much about it until now 
have lost my scroll wheel function when switching desktops. Not a big 
issue, but when it happens I have to actually point to the desktop I 
want and then click. Then of course, there was the issue that I asked 
about a few months back that affected my display and someone pointed out 
that I probably hadn't set the fonts settings correctly for my LCD 
display. This problem periodically returns even though the settings are 
correct, but if I open and close the dialogs the problem sometimes stops.

I have a Gig-a-Byte MoBo (GA-MA790FX-DS5) with an AMD Athlon 64 x2, 4GB 
RAM (OCZ 800MHz), 1ea Diamond PCIe x16 HD3650 Video w/1GB VRAM. I have 
never seen memory usage reach 2GB or above, but, the problem seems to 
happen when I have a large # files open in say OpenOffice or especially 
Adobe Reader. I have also seen where if I have a OOo Calc sheet open to 
max. window display and I am using the calc to verify a formula, when I 
switch back to calc part of the calculator remains displayed on top of 
my spreadsheet. Could this be a driver issue? Or could it be ATI chips? 
Or maybe just bad VRAM or RAM?

Any opinions?