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Hi Bill, This sounds very unusual. We have 3rd party RAM in almost all of our Macs, and I've never had a repair request denied by AppleCare. This is an allowed DIY (do it yourself) installation in most if not all their recent machines. It's common knowledge now that hard drives fail all the time, new or old - just seems to be hit or miss from all manufacturers these days and certainly not the users fault. We had an iMac hard drive fail within 3 months, and had no problem getting the repair from AppleCare. If it is AppleCare your are dealing with, call back and explain what you received back from them. If you don't get a satisfactory answer, ask to talk to a supervisor, and keep going up the chain until someone with sufficient authority can explain this message or get it repaired properly. I would also suggest running memtest, or their own extended Apple Hardware Test (usually on the discs that came in the box), to prove the memory is working fine (from bootable CD/DVD or external drive). With their own test verifying the RAM, how can they prove it caused a disk failure? In one and only one case, I had to go outside AppleCare. The best route turned out to be through the institute's procurement department. There is a single Apple higher education representative that takes all the orders from here via procurement. That turns out to be a lot of orders (i.e. money), so there is more concern about resolving problems. I wrote a detailed e-mail and received a positive reply that led to a full repair. There may also be Apple higher education account executives and engineers working with your university. They may be helpful as well. Your work has undoubtedly helped to promote Macs and probably a few sales as a result. I would suggest tactfully including this in your correspondence should it come to this. If its not AppleCare, then I hope a similar approach would also work. Best of luck, Jeff On Feb 8, 2007, at 3:04 PM, William Scott wrote: > Hi folks: > > Sorry this is a wee bit off topic, but since I am more likely to > get a straight answer from people here, I'm going to ask.. > > I have 2 identical laptops. We bought both for the lab about 2 > years ago. They are G4 ppc. I bought an extra half gig of memory > for each at the time of purchase, but I think it is from ramjet, > not Apple. > > Both drives failed within a few weeks of one another, making me > wonder if they were really built by Ford. The second one came back > from Apple today with a snotty message saying that the third-party > memory had caused the problem and that they will refuse to do a > repair if we ever send them a computer in the future with a third- > party memory chip in it. > > This strikes me as absolute horse-hockey, but then again, maybe I > am not aware of something I should be. > > Thanks. > > Bill >