Model Forum / General / Models / August 2009

Cheers Archie :) It's been fine for over 2 days now on the chips currently
in it btw so at least my baseline is now a minimum of 448mb. Just to remind
you the 128 sticks need to be single sided i.e. only having chips on one
side of the board or I'll exceed my 4 rows limit if they have to go in along
with a double sided 256mb stick.

I remember doing both the engine and gearbox on my Marina when I was about
20, outside on a gravel track, no engine hoist and no help and no real fears
about managing it. I seem to recall lowering the engine to the ground once
I'd got the mounts off then jacking the car as high as I could get it and
dragging it out from underneath. Then there was some faffing about with me
on my back lowering the box onto my chest and sliding it off me sideways. I
have no memory at all of how I got them back in though but clearly I must
have done. Just doing a set of brake pads 30 years later is enough to ruin
my day. I'm too old for all this crap now.

Got them thanks Archie. Although neither the manual or the Crucial website
were very clear about it the new single sided 256mb chip works fine
alongside the first double sided 256mb chip you sent so apparently there
wasn't a limit of 128mb per row. So that's me up to 512mb and it's been
running happily for a day now. I did cheekily try adding another 128mb chip
in the 3rd slot but it only counted up to 512mb as the manual said it would.
I'd upgraded to the latest BIOS I could find on the Intel website and was
rather hoping that might have got round the original memory limit but fraid
not. Anyway 512mb is plenty for XP and the stuff I use it for. If one of the
256mb chips goes down I also have the backup of two 128mb ones to swap in
instead which is nice.

It's weird thinking back to my first pc, an Amstrad 1512 which I bought in
1987 and which still works perfectly btw, which also has 512 of ram - except
it's 512kb not mb. I vaguely recall paying a small fortune to upgrade it to
640kb from 512kb and I paid another £300 for a 20mb (yes mb not gb) hard
disk which back then was a serious amount of money. From memory it ran at
8mHz and this one runs at 733mHz (which is still pathetic by today's
standards) so with 100 times faster processor and 1000 times more memory
where have we actually got to? I still use the same old Dos spreadsheet I
did back then because I never got round to really learning Excel. Most
applications back then came on a single floppy diskette and did everything
you really needed. I've never really understood why modern applications need
100mb of disk space but do bugger all extra compared to things that were
written into a few hundred kb 20 years ago. Oh and beer only cost a few
pence a pint and the bread tasted better and my back didn't ache and my eyes
could focus at 6 inches instead of 12. Grumble moan.

By sheer coincidence someone was helping me clear out the spare room on
Friday and came across a bunch of IDE cables of which one was an 80 strand
item which I now realise actually was the one I'd had installed in my
previous pc. It's grey not white like all the other cables and I now clearly
remember using it. Not knowing the difference it made I must have swapped
the disk into this current pc using an older 40 strand cable that would
probably already have been inside it. So anyway I slapped that in instead
and my hard disk says it's now running in UDMA mode 6 instead of mode 2
although to be honest I can't actually tell it's going any faster during
file transfers. It must be doing summat though.

I think that's everything I can do to make this old beast run as fast as
possible so hopefully after so much buggering about the motherboard or cpu
or power supply won't now suddenly decide to call it a day and put me back
to square one. If it keeps working I reckon it'll do me for a goodly while.

I now owe someone a favour in return to balance my karma and keep the world
turning smoothly on its axis.