Unstable after RAM upgrade

Im glad its working out for you. I have the same kit (crucial) and I have the same macbook. It worked fine for a few hours. Then I put my mac to sleep and the screen would not wake up from sleep. I would have to shut down using the power button. Then my widgets wouldn't work.

The Apple Manual is wrong, and if your Kingston RAM works it is actually 204-pin. There is no 200-pin DDR3 RAM.

I know what you mean about the pricing back then though. I paid $139.99 for OWC RAM in October. (Though that isn't the RAM I'm actually using now due to issues with it).

I'll give you the 204 pin count. The difference between the ram that works and the ram that doesn't is the 4 extra pins in the working ram are null. that is why the spec calls for 200 pin. You are correct in the fact that all of the chips have 204 pins, but there is a difference. The 204 pins that are not nulled are for PC's

No problems using the Crucial 4GB RAM kit from dabs.com

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?QuickLinx=58BL

x2 obviously!

UPDATE: I bought the OWC 4gb kit and it has been working fine for 3 hours. it hasn't froze or crashed and everything has been working.

Brief history: I initially tried Crucial's 4gb kit but it didn't work. Within minutes after the installation, laptop would crash and widgets and every movement with mouse would cause all windows to hide like you're using the 4 finger scroll. And once you put the laptop to sleep, it doesn't wake up.

Ok, here's my story. I got my macbook on march 10th and according to the serial number it is indeed a late 2008 model (manufactured in November). First I updated my system to the latest firmware and 10.5.6 and then I upgraded my memory to 4gb kingston which was sold to me as certified memory for apple computers. Shortly after that my macbook froze with the nasty colored lines. I read pretty much all user posts here as well as other articles on the subject and I think that the memory is not the main problem - it's software. Here are the arguments:

~ both macbooks and mb pros with 4gb ram are affected
~ 4gb of apple memory is not a guarantee for stable operation
~ 1, 2 or 3gb of any ddr3 memory is pretty much a guarantee for stable operation
~ a combination of 1gb apple ram and 2gb other ram works fine

Also in addition to those I think it's wrong for people to think that when they put their 2gb stock memory back in and all works well then it must be the third party memory. But we've seen that this is not necessarily the case.

Finally I will conclude with what I think is a temporary solution to the problem. I decided to leave my 4gb of kinston memory in my macbook and then set the maxmem kernel flag to the value of 3456 by editing com.apple.Boot.plist. Rebooted and success! The system recognizes 3.38gb of ram and is running smoothly. This is further proof that the problem comes from the os not the hardware. But again it could be a combination of both... 🙂

So has anyone tried this yet?

Well I can say right now, that this is nos a hardware problem....

3 days working via bootcamp with XP SP3 32bits, and no problems at all.... Just one day using Leopard (today) 2 freezes...

This is quit annoying.

I bought OCZ ram for my father's Aluminum MacBook, 2x2GB kit, and have had problems with having no video when waking up the MacBook from sleep. The HD would spin up and the keyboard would light up but no video. i would have to do a hard shut down and restart.

I contacted OCZ who said the ram should work in the MacBook and suggested I just install one stick at a time to see if I had a bad stick. I tried each stick of 2GB ram in each slot and restarted. This is what I found out:

Each stick alone in the upper slot would work fine, no problems waking from sleep, no Finder restarts. But once I tried each stick in the lower slot that was when problems came up. No video when waking from sleep and occasional Finder restarts.

So now the question is, is it the ram or the slot? Once I put back the original ram no problems. I tested the OCZ ram using the Apple Diagnostic test and MemTest and they passed.

I then bought Mushkin ram from NewEgg,

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820146878

and haven't had a problem. I suspect that maybe there is something that Mushkin knows that OCZ doesn't. Maybe there is something that causes problems when you have non-Apple supplied ram installed in the lower slot. I don't know for sure. I am just happy that the Mushkin ram right now is working. Now what do I do with the OCZ ram? : )

How about this:

edit com.apple.Boot.plist and set the kernel flag:

maxmem=4100

any difference at all? In my case the problem is resolved and I have 4gb of kingston ram. Weird stuff.

I haven't tried what you suggested but even with the OCZ memory I could see 4GB of RAM, it was the waking up with no video that was the problem. I just don't know why now that I have Mushkin RAM installed I no longer have the video problem. Maybe I will try what you suggested with my OCZ RAM and see if that fixes the problem with that RAM.

Thanks

i apologize but maxmem=4100 doesn't work. try maxmem=3456

So you are telling the system that the maximun amount of memory is 3.5...

That maybe solve the freezes, but no the problems, because I don't want 3.5 GB... I want... my 4 ones.

Bought the Kingston 4GB kit (2 2GB sticks) with the Ephida (sp?) chips and had lots of video corruption. Took it back to Best Buy and got the 4GB kit from Crucial which had the Micron chips that were on the original 2GB kit and is working flawlessly now.

Is this really working? It's been a few weeks, is your system still stable?

No, it doesn't work. It still crashes.

BTW I have found in the nvidia site, if you look for our gpu, in downloads appears a pdf with a compatibilty list of ram brands. I think that we have been stupids... maybe Nvidia adviced everyone on it site a we just bougth the we wanted.

Kingston didn't appears.... so I have a big problem....