Wednesday 3 September 2008

Memory boost

Having had my laptop for almost a year I decided this month that it was finally time to treat the machine to a memory update. Groaning away under a mere gigabyte and toiling daily with Vista, Firefox and the rest my increased use for work purposes was pushing the wee machine to its very limits. More than a few programmes open at once and things would move slower and slower - and a certain few memory hogging webpages would bring the entire system to a crashing halt. I ordered the memory at the weekend and two beautiful gigabytes arrived today. Rich kindly fitted the new memory for me (I only do software, not hardware!) - and off we went. Woosh!

Everything is running faster. The default level of RAM use seems to reside below 50% now (previously usually somewhere around 60-70%). Firefox goes faster... Thunderbird goes faster - the graphics card (which shares the RAM) should also now work better. It's all good really!

The thing that they don't tell you when you buy a computer is that although Vista could run with 512 megabytes (technically, apparently) most manufacturers actually recommend 2GB. So why did both the computers we purchased new with Vista installed each only arrive with 1GB? Inexplicable. Now the memory is sorted I think my next aim will be to upgrade my Vista from Home Basic. That's another thing nobody tells you. To fully integrate on a home network requires Premium not Basic. Whilst the PC running Premium can see the laptop the laptop running Basic can't see the PC. Annoying. It also means that the Xbox 360 needs an wireless adaptor as it can't connect to the network via the laptop running Basic! Oh the trials and pitfalls.

Most immediate computer task - connect my parents to Broadband. The poor things currently connect to cyberspace via a dial-up pay-as-you-go connection!