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.

EDIT: I found that Squeeze wasn’t the root cause of my problems.  If you want to try Squeeze, I think you can do it safely.  However, I’ll leave the instructions below for how to “uninstall” Squeeze.

So after Saturday’s install of Squeeze, I’ve had some issues with my Mac.  Here are the issues I’ve observed so far:

• Random hard OS X crashes
• CrashPlan engine crashing
• Spotlight indexing never completes

Of course, I can’t say that Squeeze caused all of these issues, but I think that it’s not worth the risk to save 600MB on a 500GB hard drive.  If anything, I’m going to say that Spotlight issues were the root cause of the CrashPlan issues, and I have no idea about the OS X crashes.  However, I was able to fix it pretty quickly.  After removing the directories from the Squeeze interface, just run this command from terminal for each directory you “squeezed”:

mac:~ myhome$ afscexpand Dropbox/

The command will complete after a minute or so (depending on size), and you’ll be left with your files in the original uncompressed state.