Last week I issued a caution about Squeeze possibly causing kernel panics.  Well, it turns out that Squeeze wasn’t the root cause, but it probably just made my problem more evident.  If you want to give Squeeze a shot, go for it!  Don’t let my experience scare you off.

The problem was that one of my 4GB SODIMMs was bad, and that was what was causing all the kernel panics.  I had previously tried testing my RAM with TechTool Pro, but it didn’t find any issues.  A friend of mine suggested that I tried Memtest OS X.  Low and behold, it found issues left and right!  I tried removing and swapping sticks and narrowed it down to one specific stick.  The RMA is in and while I’m temporarily down to 5GB of RAM (long story) instead of 8GB, I can at least run stably now.

Last week I hit a wall of frustration trying to run several VMs and always being at or near 100% memory and the swapping that resulted.  Usually just one VM and the typical applications I ran in OS X were enough to bring everything to it’s knees.  Well, I decided enough was enough and placed an order for an 8GB kit from Newegg.com.  This is the result:

Just testing it out, I launched 2 XP VMs and a Windows  7 VM, along with every app I typically use.  I didn’t hit 100%, but I did make it over the 6GB barrier:

Before doing this, I was really torn between a SSD drive and this upgrade.  However, this appears to have solved all my woes.  I’m sure SSD would be even better, but this is amazing as is.

Would I recommend this upgrade?  If you use VMware Fusion heavily on your Mac, and especially if you do demos in VMs with your Mac, I would say with no reservations.