[Bob_Blaylock]

I have a beige G3 which had 128 megabytes of RAM (one 64 MB DIMM and two 32 MB DIMMs). I'm running MacOS X 10.2.8 Jaguar.

I just recently acquired a 256 MB DIMM, which I installed in place of one of the 32 MB DIMMs, so now I have 352 megabytes.

This was few days ago. Since then, it has happened thrice that my display has suddenly gone black, and my system apparently become unresponsive. In each case, I was able to cause a hard reboot with Command-Option-Power. I never saw this kind of crash before the upgrade. I have tried shifting the DIMMs around to different sockets.

Of course, I've observed proper anti-static precautions.

The most obvious conclusion is that my new 256 MB DIMM is defective in some manner. But before I come to that conclusion, I was wondering if there are any other known issues with the Beige G3 that could be responsible for this behavior. I believe it's a revision 1 motherboard.

[TomMacs]

It's a bad DIMM, you should return it, but was it used? Plus try to stay away from brands you never heard of.

[Bob_Blaylock]

I bought it from MemoryX.com; they appear to be fairly reputable, and to have a good warranty policy. We'll see how it goes. A short time ago, I had my fourth blackout crash, and shortly after I recovered from that, I had a more proper Kernel Panic. Recovering from that, I had a second Kernel Panic. I Have now removed the offending 256MB DIMM, and reinstalled the 32MB DIMM that I had removed to install the 256, so now I'm back down to only 128 megs of RAM.

I guess it's time to see if their warranty process is as good as it appears to be. I'll let you all know.

[Bob_Blaylock]

The replacement arrived earlier today, whereupon I immediately installed it.
So far, no kernel panics, no blackout crashes, or anything like that. There is one odd thing that happened, that I've only seen happen once before; that once beforewas during the short time that the now-assumed-defective DIMM was installed. The mouse pointer froze. Everything else was working. I could see the clock display running in my upper-right corner, and I could CMD-Tab between applications, and everything. When this happened before, the pointer happened to be over something that would respond to clicking, and when I clicked, it did indeed respond. The only thing was that the mouse pointer would not move. I suppose it's possible that this is just a rare glitch, having nothing to do with the memory, and that it's nothing more than a coincidence that the only two times it occurred were while this machine had 352 megs installed, having had only 128 megs during the vast majority of the time that I've owned it.
I'm using a Logitech wheel mouse, along with Logitech's drivers for it.