Ok, so my friend has had his custom built gaming PC for about 8 months. During these 8 months it was fine, until last night when his League of Legends game wouldn't actually allow him to enter a game, it would just crash.

At first, I thought it was a simple LoL problem, and a repair would fix it. Therefore, I told him to repair his installation and see if it worked then. However, during the repair his PC blue screened (BSOD) with the MEMORY_MANAGEMENT problem 0x1a.

I then told him to try again, as sometimes BSODs happen randomly, and maybe it was a one off. It blue screened again, with the exact same error.

Using the advice that topics from a Google search gave, I told him to first, update all of his drivers and then see if there were any windows updates. He did that, but whilst the computer was checking for updates, it blue screened again, with the same error again.

After that, I told him to try sfc /scannow, as the minidumps from the BSOD errors pointed to the file ntoskrnl.exe, which is the Windows kernel I think? There was nothing wrong with the system files.

At this point I had been putting off the suggestions of RAM related problems for a while now, as surely his RAM couldn't just randomly stop working, but there were now no other options left, as none of these solutions had fixed the problem at all. As a result, I told him how to download memtest86+, and to run it and check for RAM related errors. Usually, people on Google recommended at least 7 full tests (if there are no errors) before making a judgement. However, the first test alone gave over 500,000 errors!

My questions here are:
1. Can RAM literally fail just like that?
and
2. Is it even the RAM causing these problems at all?

Thanks TTG!