On the topic of 3rd party ram…

3rd party ram is cheap. Cheaper certainly than Apple ram. This might lead one to the assumption that it’s a better purchase than Apple ram. Normally I would be inclined to agree.

Then this happened:

For the uninitaed, that’s a Kernel Panic, in short a total system crash. What’s impressive is that it came up during a system install.

Kernal Panics can indicate any number of software or hardware issues, that eventually cause you computer to crash. In the bygone days before protected memory, and multithreaded operating systems, total system crashes were common. This is not the case any more–Apple suport tends to regard Kernel Panics as a strong indicator of a hardware issue.

Aside: In case this happens to you and you call support, Applecare support will normally ask the following common troubleshooting questions:

• Have you installed any 3rd party ram?

No matter what, if you answer “yes” to this question, all other troubleshooting will usually cease until the 3rd party ram is removed.

• Have you run disk utility to repair permissions, and check your disk?
• Is your drive reporting any type of errors (what’s the status of the S.M.A.R.T. reporting)
• Does this happen in any specific apps / 3rd party apps?
• Have you tested this in another profile?
• Is you firmware up to date?
• Have you cleared you PRam, and reset your PMU?
• Have you run the Apple Hardware Test (AHT), have you run it in extended mode, have you run it in looped extended mode?

Back to the story. I bought 3rd party Ram. It was fine, or so I thought. Then I had the following issues:

1. Kernel Panic when using Aperture
2. Kernel Panic when installing OS
3. Video corruption when using OS (and by using, I mean watching a trailer in Quicktime, and running NO other programs Safari and Software update)

And by video corruption, I mean:

and:

So I put back in the Apple ram (512 megs–ughh!) and thought everything would be fine.

Then my machine wouldn’t login to my user account. The AHT said everything was fine–which was not true.

Disk Utility–while booted from the MacBook install disk–reported errors. “Hmm, that’s not normal.” Letting Disk Utility attempt to repair them resulted in failure, and–as is often the case–the drive no longer showed up on the desktop.

Shit.

DiskWarrior is great with stuff like this, and it was able to repair the drive and get it to show up on the desktop. But now, (even though S.M.A.R.T. reporting was showing that my drive was OK) I was having a hard time believing it.

Various files on my desktop weren’t copying to an external drive, Superduper couldn’t sucessfully clone the drive.

To recap:

1. Kernel Panic
2. Video Corruption
3. Data storage issues

So yeah, a few RMA’s later, my MacBook is back up and running. Complete with new ram, a new hard drive and most (if not all) of my data back in place.

Moral of the story? I have no idea. It’s not like I ran right out to buy Apple ram, or that I’m never going to replace my stock hard drive with a newer, larger model.

In fact, it’s because I got new ram, and a new hard drive, that I was able to revert back to the stock ones when the new stuff failed–or maybe it’s because of the new stuff that I had to.

Either way,I don’t really care–after all, mechanical shit breaks. Plan for it.