A couple of weeks back, my machine at home started to crash randomly when I was playing Battlefield 1942 (Desert Combat, of course). It was quite annoying since I thought it might have been a software issue and ended up rebuilding the machine only to find that the same funk was persisting.

It turns out that one of my twin, 512MB Corsair XMS memory modules was bad. Really bad. When I ran Memtest86 against the RAM, I consistently ended up with metric ass-loads of errors in the 512MB+ range. Battlefield 1942, being the memory hog that it is, would crash the whole system after ~1-5 minutes of play.

In any case, I started looking around for new memory to replace the module. As I was looking, I noticed that Corsair offers a lifetime warranty on their products! Awesome! So I navigated to their site only to be confounded by the stupid-as-Jessica-Simpson method of obtaining an RMA number.

In any case, after trudging through the process, I got an email on Tuesday (I think I sent it out on Saturday of Labor Day weekend) confirming my RMA.

I packed up the memory and sent it out via UPS Ground the next day. Meanwhile, I'd been playing Battlefield 1942 with only 512MB of RAM...oh the horror! It was laaaaaaag city.

So today, I finally got my replacement modules. To my surprise, they were new modules (I was half expecting refurb?). Not only that, they sent back double the amount of RAM that I sent them. Yup. I got back a full gig of RAM. Oh wait, it gets better! It was DDR400! I only sent them DDR333.

Needless to say, I am a happy customer. Not that I've been using other brands of memory in the last few years (I've put together/upgraded ~6 computers? Used Corsair each time). The only downside is that they sent back registered memory. Unfortunately, my Asus P4S533 doesn't support registered memory. Doh! You'd figure they'd look this stuff up first. Luckily, I have another machine that is currently using a 512MB stick that matches the one I have at home and this machine supports registered memory.

So, all-in-all, a good experience! Corsair gets a 9/10 on this one. -3 points for sending me incompatible memory. +2 points for sending me double my original amount.