burn-in
it happened to me before, new computer for new personnel. both comes in the same day. after a week the computer is doing blue screens and memory dumps at least three times a day. it took a couple of hours of diagnostics, a week to replace the bad memory module and a couple of days of interrupted work for the new person.
lesson learned. whenever i get a new computer set, i try to make sure it goes through a burn-in period. i try to stress out the cpu, memory and hard disk for about a week non-stop to weed out any quirks in the system before i release it in the workplace. if anything breaks i can still have it replaced.
these days i use the ultimate boot cd. it has several diagnostic utilities and a handful of software programs to burn-in a component or the system as a whole.
