yeah 4 gigs will work, i think. i only have 2, but one of the guides i read for DS3* boards said there's a way to get it to work. just can't remember right now i'm with you on the importance of a stable system. i have a feeling that a good number of people on these forums either don't run anything demanding on their systems, or they just don't use their systems enough to notice the issues we've been having. but, hell, i'll keep running my AMD as a hackintosh with Tubgirl 10.4.10 ... but that's about all it's good for in the hackintosh realm. :\