I'm so damn mad right now... Apacer memory..

Lesson(s):

Use Newegg.com in case you need to RMA.

Use a company / brand that you can trust. (Kingston, OCZ, Crucial, Corsair)

Think of ram as short term memory. If you have holes in your short term memory, what happens? You forget what you were doing, where you placed things, etc etc. Exact same thing is going to happen with your laptop, only your machine doesnt know how to cope with those kinds of things. In short, yes, you are more prone to hanging and BSODs than other people.

You shouldnt have to pay anything to have the ram sent back. Not sure on the companies return policy but if you just bought the sticks and theyre defective, they sohuld send you some new ones free of charge and find a way for you to send the defective ones back free of charge. They of course wont agree to do that at first but enough arguing will more than likely get you what you want.

Definitely replace them though. Defective ram is a big no-no.

Its likely that the RAM is just crap and you didn't cause any ESD damage. You should always buy name brand RAM. People go out and buy alot of crap RAM because its cheaper and say it runs the same and then they wonder why their having system issues down the road with blue screens and other memory related problems. OCZ, Crucial, and Kingston are three of the best brands for laptop memory.

Quite simply, you get what you pay for

7 hours and only 5 errors is more or less typical of memory. You see, we aren't running ECC memory, so there are bound to be errors. If all non-ECC memory ran for hours on end with no errors, then there wouldn't be a market for ECC memory. That said, I'd finish testing 5 hours on this stick, then try the other stick for 5 hours. Unless you get alot of errors, the stick is fine. Play some games (the CS:S is really good at finding memory errors), if you get many crashes or a blue screen, then it's time to RMA.

Honestly, at this point there's no reason to buy more expensive "brand" memory (aren't they all brands? He's not buying generic you realize). Again, Dell's BIOS is locked, so any memory module installed is going to run at it's pre-programmed SPD timings of DDR533 4-4-4. Since they're all running this standard, there's no reason really to get anything beyond the cheapest stick as long as it's from a good reseller with a good RMA policy. I know some of you are going to argue and complain that cheap memory sucks and that's why it crashes etc. etc. The truth is all memory manufacturers punch out bad sticks every now and then, who doesn't after thousands of good ones? Look around the forum, you'll see kingston fail, OCZ fail, Transcend fail, etc. etc. all manufacturers get bad chips or produce a bad stick, it happens, that's why you buy RAM with a good RMA policy. Now, if we were overclocking, that'd be a different story, I'd say go with the highest quality stick you can, but that isn't the case, so save your money for something else.