RAM is a crapshoot

I’ve been having some problems with my 2.5 week old MacBook Pro where it spontaneously restarts. It happened again today while I was doing a backup and after some research on the web, I found that others were blaming RAM. So, I called The Chip Merchant and they said to bring my machine in and they’d look at it. I brought the machine in and while they couldn’t determine that RAM was the problem, they said that others have had problems with that brand of RAM and would replace it. Hopefully this replacement solves my problems. What I’d like to know is why is RAM such a crapshoot? I’ve bought RAM from The Chip Merchant for the last 10 years (through at least one change of ownership) and only had problems with the RAM I bought for my server last year and potentially now. I don’t blame them as other people have problems with RAM from other vendors. RAM is supposed to be a standard, but I guess manufacturing tolerances on the modules as well as the computers vary so widely, that there is no way to guarantee that a RAM module will work in any given machine. I would have expected that over the years things would have gotten better, but RAM seems to be the leading cause of computer wackiness.

Maybe in my next life I won’t have to deal with computers and the randomness associated with issues.

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