Are you smarter than an Apple Store Genius?

[OnceYouGoMac]

I like to think I am I have never once gone to an Apple Genius Bar. Love the thread title though, it would be good for a TV quiz show dedicated to Apple

 

[r0k]

I have a late 2011 MBP that came with 4 GB of RAM. I put in 8 GB the very next day, then decided I wanted more so I took back the 8 GB and bought 16 GB. All seemed fine until I started having Kernel panics. I contacted Applecare and the first thing they asked me about was 3rd party RAM. They asked me to put the 4GB back in and see if I still had the problem.

At first I was a bit annoyed at this but as an intermediate step, I downloaded and ran Memcheck. It found several errors. If only I'd run it within 24 hours of buying the RAM, I'd have already taken it back and exchanged it for known good RAM. Now I'm faced with returning it to Centon for replacement. Once I've got known good RAM that passes Memcheck, if I'm still having crashes and occasional KP's I'll return to Applecare for help. I'm in no hurry as I have 3 years to work this all out.

So I must agree with those in this thread that recommend to the OP that he take the 3rd party parts out of his MP before getting it serviced. Another excellent practice is to do a new fresh completely from scratch backup before taking it to Apple for service. They have been known to return stuff empty.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Another excellent practice is to do a new fresh completely from scratch backup before taking it to Apple for service. They have been known to return stuff empty.

Fwiw, and awhile I completely agree with you, they're not liable for data loss.

 

[monokakata]

OK, I'll lay a possibility. I have a Mac Pro and my iTunes library isn't on the system drive. It's on another drive (but in the same case). I also have the drives set to spin down when unused.

If I haven't been using that drive, and I start up iTunes, I get the same results you do -- a wait. This is because the drive's got to spin up. Any time after that -- while I'm listening -- there's no wait. But if I don't use that drive for long enough that OS X spins it down, then I get a lag again.

So . . . maybe something like that? Where's your iTunes library? Does what you've been doing before you start up iTunes make any difference?

Everything you report is consistent with a drive that needs to spin up. Of course being consistent with something doesn't mean it's the cause.