One good thing happened.
I'm not going to write about all the crap I have been wading through this week, but one good thing did happen.
A couple of months back, Wally the Welder gave me a laptop his daughter had disposed of to him. It lights up, still works even with a missing K key but it was struggling with multitasking running just 1 Gb of RAM.
I bought a chip and put it in and the machine was only registering 1Gb still. Did all the steps of elimination which proved the new chip was operational, so it suggested that the one port was non operational. That is until Rob, the helpful aftersales manager at Mr. Memory asked me to send photos of both chips.
Although the spec was correct for the machine, he did say there was a difference in the chipsets and so arranged the return and replacement of the chip completely free of charge.
It came on Wednesday and I popped it in half heartedly. I could tell within a couple of minutes even before the machine was fully booted up that things were different. Prior to this, I'd been having to boot it at least 2 times and noticed the CPU and RAM meter widget was registering 95% RAM usage. With the new chip we are talking more like 45%.
Friends take the piss because I've been saying it for years, "you can't have too much RAM". On the odd occasion I have bought new machines from scratch, I have always done so with as much RAM on board as I could afford at the time. These days, it's as cheap as chips (if you pardon the pun), but I remember when RAM was £ 25 a megabyte.
Of course if you are running Windows Vista or 7 32 bit, your PC only handles memory management of up to 3 Gb (which is annoying). If you upgrade to 64 bit, you can run to the physical limits of the machine, but if your software is 32 bit, you will be shelling out for new proggies in some cases, especially if like me, you are poor and all your software is old (Paint Shop Pro 9 for example).
One annoying thing I found on this little Packard Bell lapdog was Chrome halting and Flash crashing. It's done neither since the new RAM chip was fitted.
If you're UK based, I can thoroughly recommend www.mrmemory.co.uk as a supplier. They aren't expensive, they ship fast and if you encounter problems like I did with this machine and Helen's last month, they will get involved and help you sort things out.
Upgraded Welder's lapdog with new RAM and a new hard drive about 4 months back and he's not managed to bost it yet, so there's a lot to be said in praise of lotsa RAM.
My iMac is running SO much better since I increased the RAM from 1GB to 4GB (which is the maximum it can take). I say "I" - really, my husband put it in. But I bought it, so I guess "I" works. :)
Posted by: Average Jane | July 17, 2012 at 03:59 PM