Having upgraded to a Macbook Pro, the first thing I did with it was upgrade the hard drive and memory, just like I did with my first Macbook. However, after a few days of use, it suddenly started suffering Kernel Panics and random freezes. After running diagnostics and swapping the hard drive back, all with no improvement, I checked out the Apple support site and found a number of people saying exactly the same thing was happening to them – they’d upgraded to 4Gb and now their Macbook Pro was crashing.

Some posts claimed that certain brands of RAM – Hynix & Samsung in particular – seemed to be OK, whereas others, even Crucial, would cause problems. My RAM is Transcend. On the plus side, a few posts suggest that 3Gb – an original 1Gb and an upgraded 2Gb stick – would work OK whilst we await news from Apple of a fix.

Out of curiosity, while I was buying a sleeve for my laptop in Albion, an Apple reseller on the Strand in London, I asked if they’d come across this problem, and was told they had and that it was a fault with the logic board in the late 2008 Macbook Pros. They also suggested that Apple might be recalling them, but didn’t give me any more information such as where they’d got that information from, so I have no idea if it’s true or not.

Anyway, just to check it was the memory causing my problems and nothing else, I put the original 2Gb back in, and the laptop was fine for five days. Today I decided to try the 4Gb again, just in case I hadn’t seated it correctly or something daft like that. So far, after about 12 hours of usage, it has been fine, but then it was fine for a few days after putting the RAM in the first time, so time will tell. If it does play up then I’ll drop down to 3Gb and see how that goes.