The fact that you are able to reinstall the OS without any catastrophic failures (clicking, failure to boot, unrecognizable disk), along with the fact that data becomes corrupt during memory intensive processes, and the fact that your windows installation was only using a portion of your available RAM makes me suspect the controller or slot.

While I don't discount the other answer (it very well could be your hard drive) I would suspect your RAM controller or RAM slot. At first I thought it was Mem, then I thought it was the OS, now I don't really know what could be happening. When watching movies in VLC (mkv, avi, etc) the video becomes pixelated sometimes.Īpplications quit unexpectedly sometimes.ĭid a clean install of OS X Lion, and the issues improved to a certain degree, but still occurs sometimes. Occasionally, my screen becomes 'pixelated' in random areas (the image gets distorted as if it was magnified and then pixelated). My Shockwave Flash started crashes constantly a lot under Google Chrome. zip files, after uncompressing them, I sometimes get CRC errors and checksum problems. I installed it and started having problems again:

I kept using SL for a few months without any problems (did't bootcamp this time) and then OS X Lion came out. I formatted the whole system and reinstalled Snow Leopard, put back the 8GB RAM and ran the mem test again, and it passed 100% this time. I figured my RAM was faulty, so I switched back to my old 2GB memory that came with the mac, but I got the same error in the mem test. I tried repairing permissions but it seemed to be beyond repair.

The Windows partition worked fine, though. One day, out of nowhere, I got a kernel panic the OS X partition stopped working. It came with SL and I immediately installed BootCamp and upgraded it's memory to two 4GB, low latency Corsair. It's a mid 2010 model with 2.4Ghz and 2GB RAM.

Mac mini mid 2010 ram