I don't know what that error is about. Maybe Reboot knows.

Well, apparently something failed and it made me freak out and nearly knock people over to go get something out of the case in my locker.

REBOOT! CALLING REBOOT! WHERE ARE YOU!?

LOL. I was out fixing Macs. It's what I do for a living. Adults don't get off at 3:00, not ones that still have to work anyway.

The black stripe with white text is a kernel panic, 99% of the time it means hardware error. Take the RAM chip that you took out, and put it into the slot where you have the one chip. The newer KP has the grey window shading thing, can't remember if 10.3 does the grey, but the black bar/white text that you got I see often often on new systems with bad RAM.

If you get the same thing after putting the other RAM chip into the good slot, I hate to say it, but the old laptop has a serious hardware problem, probably on the logic board. Slight chance it's the HD, very very slight. The only way to check would be with another HD. I really doubt it's that though.

but then I would have to turn it off! oh ok.

With the 128 chip, its too slow to do anything. that bottom one was actually a 256. my bad.

So it never was reading the loose 128 chip, that makes sense as to why it was saying you had 256.

Don't know what to tell you. It's going to run slow, but let's see if it won't KP. If it doesn't it's worth scrounging a new chip.

But I have STUFF to do on it!

Like?

Can anybody you know put this into it?