[X4U] Bad Memory Causing Kernel Panic on Wake?

[Joe Sporleder]

Over a week ago, I installed a couple of memory sticks from OWC (Newer Technology brand) to get my 13" MacBook Pro up to 8GB of RAM. I also installed a 640GB Western DIgital 2.5" hard drive, replacing the 320GB that came with it (I used Disk Utility to clone the old drive info onto the new one). I'm running MacOS X 10.6.4. I am getting kernel panics on wake from sleep, and sometimes when starting up fresh after the computer has been off for a while.  Almost like clock work, I can easily reproduce 80% of the time the kernel panic - simply put it to sleep for a while and then wake it up. Wouldn't memory problems manifest randomly or under stressful loads? I have often had just email and Safari open, and that's often about all I run at home. At work it is usually hooked up to an external 24" display and a USB hub, but I'm always careful to not plug and unplug the external stuff while the machine is asleep. Last Friday and Monday while the MacBook was at work with the new memory, it had a fairly heavy workload with design apps and photoshop, etc, and it worked great.

I've tried all of the things I could find on Apple's online support knowledge base on dealing with kernel panics, like repairing the hard drive and permissions (Disk Utility found some minor things that it was able to repair) - I even reset the SMU. I also ran the apple hardware test app in the extended testing mode and it found no problems with the memory. The only thing I haven't tried yet is reinstalling the OS, or swapping out with known good memory (the 4GB that was in it is long gone making another MacBook happy, but I do have a spare Mac mini that takes the same kind of memory that I can test with).

One item that is fairly consistent in the kernel panic report is "com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement" - that seems to be the last entry before everything goes bad. And, like I said above, if the machine has been off or asleep - maybe for a half an hour or more, or overnight, the kernel panic always happens within about 60 seconds after waking up (or about 60 seconds after the desktop appears if it was off). Otherwise, a quick restart and everything is fine until I need to put the machine asleep or shut it down for extended periods of time.