MacBooks having a bad week with 3rd party memory issues and NVIDIA Bumps

Computerworld covers the bad 3rd party memory, the iNquirer does the science on the bad bumps.

According to some posters on the Apple forums, Apple is going to release an update shortly that fixes issues with third party memory.  Apple, hasn’t made a statement on the matter…

…the engineer said that Apple is “very aware” of the problem and that it was not the result of using non-Apple memory, but because users were bumping up the machines to 4GB.

“They are about to release a software update to address it. He said that officially it might take up to a week or two for this to come out but unofficially we could expect it within a matter of days,” Brocklebank wrote on Dec. 4. “In the meantime he said that a solution could be found by removing one of the 2GB sticks and replacing it with the original 1GB.”

Meanwhile, the Inquirer went to extraodinary lengths (yes MacBooks were harmed) to refute NVIDIA’s claims that its chips weren’t flawed.

WHEN THE NEW Macbooks came out a few weeks ago, Nvidia stated that the chips they provided to Apple did not contain the proverbial ‘bad bumps’. Unfortunately for them, an investigation lead by the Inquirer proves that not to be the case.

Background
If you recall, Nvidia has been in the spotlight all summer for failing chips due to bad materials and thermal stress. The end result is that bumps, the tiny balls of solder that hold a chip to the green printed circuit board it sits on, crack, and the computer it is in dies. If you want the full technical analysis, read this article (and parts 2 and 3).

Nvidia took a $200 million charge over the problem in July, but the firm refuses to support its customers by saying which parts are defective, and what computers they were sold in. You can get some clue from message boards, with Dell, HP, and Apple being prominent victims.