[G4] G4 Dual 867 MDD RAM question

[Aaron]

Thanks to all responders.

I received my new RAM:

>"Kingston 512 MB 333 MHZ DDR-PC2700 DIMM CL2.5 PC Memory"  $44.77 each (including free shipping)
>which is listed at <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006HVT4/>.

and installed it Wednesday night. I left in the old PC2100 RAM stick, so there's now 1.5 G in the computer.

With one MAJOR exception, everything has been fine since then. The exception is that, a few hours after the installation, I got what is probably a "Kernel Panic". Specifically, I saw the box on my screen in about 5 languages telling me that I had to restart the machine by pressing the power button!

I restarted it successfully and have had no problems since, but I'm concerned that there may be a defect in the new RAM that will only occasionally show up.

When I first restarted the computer after installing the new RAM, I followed a procedure that I had intended to follow after installing some Apple update (a security update, IIRC) a few weeks ago. (It was described by Vincent Cayenne <vcayenne at mac.com> on the  OS X Discussion List <osx at osxlist.com>, a good list for intermediate to advanced OS X users.)

1) I held down the command-option-P-R combination until the machine chimed three times.

2) I then held down the command-option-O-F combination to get into open firmware.

3) I entered the following commands, one per line:

set-defaults
reset-nvram
reset-all

4) The machine restarted and I held down the command-S combination to get to the single-user command line interface appeared. When the scrolling stopped, I entered the following command:

applejack auto restart

(all lower case!) and pressed Return. (I had installed applejack previously.)

The machine then rebooted into OS X (its 10.3.9, BTW) and has worked fine since except for the one unexplained crash mentioned above. The machine is a helluva lot faster now.

 - Aaron