Ubuntu unstable due to BIOS settings

Just a quick & dirty note this time.

These settings caused my machine to be unstable.

CHIPSET
FSB:  166 MHz
RAM
freq: 199 MHz (DDR 398)
CAS:  3-3-3-8

Various applications (for example, Firefox, Synaptic, GNU Gadu) and both GNOME and KDE environments crashed because of segmentation faults or unknown reasons. Memtest86 detected RAM errors during moving inversions test.

With these settings everything seems to be working fine:

CHIPSET
FSB:  166 MHz
RAM
freq: 166 MHz (DDR 332)
CAS:  2.5-3-3-7

UPDATE:

A friend of mine has sent an e-mail to tell me that this post might be a little confusing. So to make things clear:

• The problem described above was caused only by wrong BIOS settings and it was by no means Ubuntu's fault.
• The above RAM timings are useful only for me; this blog is, among other things, also my notepad, so I will sometimes jot down things like this.

Problems with X server

After an upgrade Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 my machine became unstable - GNOME started to crash at random, for no apparent reason.

I looked around for a while and the I found messages like the one below written to syslog by the gdm process:

gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

I tried using KDE instead of GNOME, but that didn't help.

I installed kdm and set it as a default display manager. That didn't help either, but the messages changed to:

X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly

I did some reading and came to a conclusion that a display manager is not really necessary, so I uninstalled both gde and kde. It feels like an ugly hack to me and I don't a have a graphical login screen, but the system seems to be stable.