Aluminum MacBooks unstable after 3rd-party RAM upgrade

I bought 4GB for my macbook Aluminum from Crucial and so far it works great. It was only $103 too.

Anyone have a confirmed kit for 3rd party RAM that works with the Apple Macbook pro? I tried 2 ocw and 1 crucial, none of which worked properly.

Any help would be awesome.

I installed OWC's 4gb upgrade for my 2.4ghz MB today. Keep in mind it's a brand new computer thats only a few days old. It kept crashing when I would load up the memory past 2gb.

Then I updated osx to 10.5.6 and the crashes are no more. We'll see though... I'll have to run it for a few days to really tell but the crashes before the updates would happen within minutes of booting up and filling up the memory.

I can't say that everyone's problem is solved, but after the Dec 10 Firmware Update, my 13" MacBook is content with the 4GB OWC RAM that had given it so many problems before. Uptime now 15 hours; previously the max was 2 hours. Thank you, Santa.

I got my RAM from Data Mem (it is who we get RAM from for the school I work at). I've had my lock up several times. Including today. Resetting the PRAM didn't help.

I bought the 4GB kit from Ramjet as well and it works just fine (installed it within a week of buying my new Macbook back in October).

From our own testing customer support - we believe that the issue is most likely with the actual MacBook Pro Unibody itself. There are wide reports on the Apple forums of units even shipped direct from Apple with 4GB factory installed having these problems.

Essentially with only 2GB installed - the machine really isn't being 'tested'. It's when you have 4GB (or 6GB) that bottlenecks are reduced to where the processors can run up more to full potential.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/apple/memory/Macbook_Pro_15_Memory_Benchmarks

With that said - if there is a problem with the system, it is more likely to become evident when it's at a higher level of operation. Having 4GB of memory allows that higher level of operation.

In one recent tracked case, our customer got a replacement from Apple and the replacement had no further issue with 4GB of memory. The memory is not the problem... be it a hardware problem or something Apple will resolve with a firmware update (although that would be interesting since this is affecting only a small percentage of units (very high percentage in terms of consideration of these actually factory defective unibodies) to expect a firmware solution) - the issue is one for Apple to resolve.

I commented on Macnn sometime ago when they mentioned the issue:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/10/30/ram.and.macbook.crashes/

Also - of interest, the frequency of this issue being reported has been declining. In my opinion, this is an Apple hardware issue and it appears to be resolved with more recent productions.

I bought the 4GB upgrade kit from OWC for my new MBP. No problems.

The whole topic is very confusing which may be what's causing the problems... Look at the contradictions:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1651 -- Apple says that the Aluminum MacBooks need 200-pin PC3-8500 DDR3 1066 MHz DDR SO-DIMM.

Although Apple's 2.4 and 2.0 GHz model MacBooks don't have memory available (and why wouldn't they be the same as the same MacBook with a different processor?), on the 2.1 Aluminum MacBook, Apple's selling the old kind of DDR2 memory that was the standard for the White MacBooks. http://store.apple.com/us/memorymodel/ME_13_2_1_MB (by the way, they're selling 2 GB for $150, 4 GB for $300, and for the advertised DDR2 this is WAY to expensive).

And, the memory offered by Crucual the these MacBooks at http://myurl.me/?drdvh5 is 204-pin, not 200 pin.

All these figures from different sources are different -- why?

UPDATE: it seems that many MacBooks and new MacBook Pros cannot handle 4 GB of memory:

http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/12/macbook-fussy-m.html