3rd Party Patriot Apple RAM: Possible Fail

[tongodeon]

Last week I was bragging about the cleverness with which I avoided the Apple RAM tax by finding a really good third party deal. (Patriot 2x2GB PSA24GICDSK, sold by NewEgg and packaged by Patriot as "Mac Memory".) cypher386 mentioned to me that the new just-released (21/02/2008) version 2.01 of memtest86+ handles EFI. I ran memtest86+ and it turns out

Comments

[crisper]

The 3rd party RAM source I have used for almost ten years (since the original tangerine/lime clamshell iBooks) has been coastmemory.com, and not once have I been bitten in upgrades or extended use. I haven't subjected any of their RAM to memtest but I've also never gotten strings of panics or the like.

[tongodeon]

Oddly enough I haven't been getting any kernel panics. The worst that's happened to me is that Mozilla has crashed a few times when I open a new tab, and Photoshop just gave me a weird error saying "can't synchronize color" when I started it up to resize this photo.

[crisper]

That latter sounds really implausible to me, as a RAM hardware issue, but that's just my gut.

Anyway, Coast Memory has been good to me and my... five? six?... Mac portables over the last eight years, and they'll be getting more of my business this week as I pop 4GB into the 15" I just bought.

[crisper]

Also, check your twitter access requests, mrn.

[tongodeon]

Doh. I forgot to check. I had requests piling up for weeks. Thanks.