So the one thing that’s kinda sucked about the new job lately (where I have not been hired on full time yet, and still am a contractor), is the machine I’m using only has 128 megs of ram. Not all that bad in the scheme of things, but throw a few terminal windows and a few browser windows up, and suddenly things…. slow…. dooooooown.
Today the truck from head office in Bellingham finally arrived bearing my ram and a new keyboard (with yet another keyboard layout for me to bitch about). Joyously I threw open the case to my HP Pavilion 6830, dug through it’s tiny little box, gouged chuncks out of my hands on the sharp edges, dug out the floppy drive, sitting directly on top of the ram slots, and installed my spanking new 256mb PC133 DIMM (the box is only a cel-700, leave me alone!). Right after this there was a meeting.
I came back from the meeting thinking “holy shit this box is still slow”. I removed unused stupid services, killed off extra processes, looked through what was taking ram up, and it still felt like the box had less ram in it than before, not more. I finally look at the memory report a bit closer and see that now I only have 64megs! The new 256 wasn’t recognized.
Grrrr…..
Dig out box, dig out floppy, dig out ram, trade slots with the existing 64 (who might I ask, other than cheap-ass bastards, send out a system not only with only 128 megs of ram, but do it in 2×64 on a motherboard with only two slots?), put things kinda back together, and try again. Still no luck.
So it seems that either the ram was DOA or the board doesn’t take PC133 (according to the manual linked above it accepts up to 256meg sticks). Either way, I’m back to sitting partially in swap all the time, and not daring to run any mozilla based browsers.
This whole event has come very close to making me want to go out and buy the nice powerbook I saw at the used apple store down the road. G4-400, 384mb ram, 30G drive, CD/DVD (non-writing), airport, some left on the applecare warranty, extras (travel bag, keyboard cover), for $1995 CND. From what I heard from people this is about right (not a great deal, not a sucky deal), and I do have a bit of $$ in my business account (this would be a perfectly legit business expense).
Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo tempting……
Should I? Shouldn’t I?