I recently upgraded the ram in my mid 09 17 inch unibody macbook pro. The ram I got was the correct ram however it had some difficulty going in, the ram wouldn't properly seat but eventually I got it to boot and recognize all 8gb of ram. It was great for several days but suddenly I am having frequent problems. Applications such as safari and chrome frequently crash and activity monitor will not work at all. Assuming this was because of the ram I asked by schools technology director about this but he said that it didn't sound like a ram problem since a bad stick of ram would crash the computer because half the memory would suddenly (as far as the computer is concerned) vanish randomly. I tried running some software updates just to rule that out and this is where things got a bit more interesting. When I run the updates my hard drive makes some light buzzing noises like it is grinding against something, it isn't very loud but it was disconcerting. The updates attempt to install but they fail and I must restart the computer. While I'm pretty sure this is ram related I am home right now without my original ram and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to what I could possibly do short of opening my computer (screwdriver is also out of state).
Update: My computer has kernel panicked twice in the last few hours and on the last one safari got its homepage reset and history removed.
Update: My computer has kernel panicked twice in the last few hours and on the last one safari got its homepage reset and history removed.