ram

Stop… upgrade time!

by

My parents’ computer is in need of a mid-life upgrade. It was bought in October 2004 and, at the time, gave acceptable performance. But now it’s flagging a bit, in comparison to the latest and greatest. To save you reading the old entry, here’s the specs:

  • AMD Athlon XP 3000+
  • 512 MB RAM
  • 80 GB HD
  • DVD rewriter
  • 64MB onboard graphics
  • Plus all of the usual stuff

Three-and-a-half years on, and it looks like the main weak points are the memory and graphics. The processor is reasonably good, and I’m not inclined to replace it as the prospect quite frankly scares me, and they still have ample space on the hard drive.

512 MB RAM is low by today’s standards, and so I’m proposing an upgrade to 2 GB – the maximum the machine will hold. Upgrading the RAM on Hari’s machine, which is of a similar specification and age, made a big difference and so this would be my first choice.

The graphics are the other aspect I want to upgrade. Right now it’s a VIA onboard job, which as well as being underpowered also lacks Windows Vista drivers, so if my parents do ever upgrade (unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out) they would potentially run into problems. The machine does have an unused AGP port, and so a cheap graphics card would be an instant upgrade. It would also return those 64 MB of RAM that it used to the computer, although 64 MB is a drop in the ocean when you have 2 GB.

We still have Hari’s old graphics card lying around (in a static-proof sleeve), which is based on the nVidia GeForce 5200 FX chipset. This was okay for normal use on her computer but seriously impacted her WoW gaming. Now, my parents are hardly likely to be fragging noobs or levelling shadow priests any time soon, but a better card can be bought for very little money. In fact, £25 would buy you something based around the full nVidia GeForce 6200 chipset (as opposed to the budget FX range). So it’s a question of saving £25 and recycling the old card, or getting something better for a little more money.

The computer also needs equipping for Wifi, probably by virtue of a USB dongle, but at less than £10 a piece that’s not a major issue. The total budget for all of this is £100, with the RAM costing about £50 (looking at Crucial and Corsair prices). There’s ample room for a reasonable graphics card, but I’m wondering whether to bother or not.

What do you think?

Memory upgrade question

by

Here’s a question for all you memory techie nerd people out there:

Given the choice, would you go for Crucial memory, or Corsair Value Select memory?

The reason why I am asking is that I’m finally getting around to upgrading Hari’s computer, now that memory prices have fallen far enough for it be a little over £100 for a full 2 GB of RAM. Crucial have the memory she needs at £108, but they’re currently out of stock and there’s no indication as to when they’ll get stock back in. Scan, on the other hand, has Corsair Value Select memory available now for £107 including delivery.

Obviously the two cost the same so price isn’t an issue, but should I wait and buy Crucial memory, or get Corsair memory now? The fact that it is ‘value select’ seems to imply that it might not be as good as Crucial’s memory but I have no idea whether this is actually the case; all I know is that Crucial and Corsair are good brands.

Obviously it would be nice if she could afford high quality gaming memory but this is about the best we can do for now. Any thoughts are welcome.

Memory upgrade

by

Today I finally got around to upgrading the memory in my Mac Mini. Since buying it last year it’s had 512 MB of RAM, which is fine for general computer-ry stuff (reading email, browsing the web, maybe running iTunes in the background) but lately it’s been used more and more for playing World of Warcraft, which is a very memory-intensive program. With it running, doing anything else on the system is, at best, difficult – switching between World of Warcraft and, say, Firefox takes a long time.

I ended up buying the memory from Crucial – I’ve bought from before and had no problems, and this time was no exception. I ordered the memory yesterday morning, and despite going for the free delivery and not the more expensive guaranteed next day delivery it still came today, which is excellent. Crucial also happened to be cheaper than buying Corsair memory from either Scan or Dabs, and I’d rather not have generic memory if I can avoid it.

The reason why I have been putting the upgrade off isn’t so much the cost aspect (which ended up at £85 for 1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM), but the actual upgrade itself, and in particular taking the unit apart. It’s a very small unit and the case isn’t screwed on – you actually have to pry it open with a knife – I used a standard putty knife from Wickes. Because my unit also has Airport and Bluetooth, you have to then detach one of the antennae before then lifting the RAM out and inserting the new module. Thankfully, there are videos which explain this process – I really would not have bothered if I hadn’t seen it being done first. One thing I did do, however, was boot the computer before putting the lid back on and making it sure it worked – after going through all the effort of taking the machine apart I didn’t want to have to do it all over again just because the module wasn’t seated correctly, for example.

Thankfully, the upgrade worked, and now the Mac has double the memory to play with. It’s not a seismic difference in speed but it does feel snappier; still, my MacBook, with its Intel Core Duo processor, beats it when playing WoW. But not by quite so much.