Techy: RAM Revisited

Just a quick update on the RAM shortage I blogged about earlier.

For a while at work, we’ve had a massive 1Gb of RAM just “sitting around” the office: we came across it in the office move, but it isn’t compatible with any of our work machines so it had just been looking for a home. My boss tried it in his home machine, but it wasn’t compatible, so I decided to try it in my new Dell… 200Mhz DDR RAM won’t work in a 333Mhz FBR bus DDR requiring machine. Drat and double drat.

So I’ve been forced to actually get out my credit card (yet again) and purchase some RAM…. I managed to get a 333Mhz FBR suitable 512Mb DRAM SIMM thingy (hey, I’ve given up trying to remember how many different types of RAM there are) for a total of £89.41 from PCUpgrader and hopefully it should be arriving tomorrow or Friday. And boy do I need it! 256Mb RAM running Windows XP, Digiguide, Norton Antivirus, ZoneAlarm Pro, Mailwasher, MySQL, Apache, PGP, EditPlus, various drivers for the display, ADSL modem, printer, dual cameras, and Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer doesn’t go too far.

It seems odd that now I’ve having to upgrade up from a quarter of a gigabyte of memory as it “isn’t enough”, when just over 10 years ago I was happy with just 32Kb of RAM and floppy discs which could store a maximum of 400K of data (double sided, double density 5¼ floppies!). And has my “productivity level” really increased? Hmmm….