Hardware Craziness

We got back from our little mini-vacation, and my desktop was running very sluggishly.

Chrome just expands to fill all available memory when nothing else is doing anything. So I have to restart it once a week or so, just to make it play nicely with everything else.

There's an obvious solution to this, that worked great with my laptop: add more memory. I doubled it from 8 to 16 gigs a couple of years back, and it's only now starting to feel sluggish again. But it's still great for what it does.

One of the reasons that I chose my desktop motherboard when I bought it 7 years ago is that it included 8 memory slots. It recommends getting dedicated RAM coolers if you use them all, but that's a small price to pay if you actually need that much RAM.

At the time, it was pretty cutting-edge. I've had to replace the CPU fan and the power supply. Honestly, that isn't bad for something that runs as well as it does.

But now I'm at an impass with it.

It uses old-school memory sticks that can only handle 8 gigs at a time. The sticks I have in there now are slow. They clock in at 1373 MHz. The slowest equivalent I can find these days runs at 1600 MHz. The new stuff should auto-scale back to play well with my old obsolete stuff, but that's an annoying limitation to look at.

Especially since I'm looking at just about $65 for each memory module. My motherboard definitely recommends buying them in pairs. I've had lots of fun wonkiness over the years if I don't follow their recommendations precisely. As in the memory sometimes shows up and others don't.

Let's ponder that for a second.

I'm looking at $8 per gig of RAM.

Laura just bought a 32G memory card for her camera for $21.

I bought my first computer in the mid 90s and had to argue with salesmen (I know the term is sexist, but everyone involved was a male) to convince them that I really did want a Pentium instead of a 486. And then I had to work harder to find a 66 MHz version instead of the original 60. I was trying to buy a server-grade system that regular consumers would never need.

And then, a couple of years later, I spent months trying to special-order a 16 MB memory chip. At the time, $40 per meg was pretty reasonable.

And now I'm balking at $8 a gig, because 1600 MHz is too slow and I'm leery about wasting valuable memory slots in my next motherboard. Since RAM is one of the few things that will be worth recycling.

I have one 1 TB in that box now. Along with one or two others from way back when. The TB drive might be worth salvaging. Amazon recommended that I throw in a 1TB 7400 RPM drive for $40 along with my RAM purchase.

I still think of $1 per MB as pretty reasonable.

I guess this post shows my age.

Heh. It gets worse.

I remember watching Ronnie perform experiments with different kinds of acid to try to extract the gold from old computer parts.