upgrade

New, new iPhone

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iPhone 5 and iPhone 6

Later today I will have a brand new iPhone 5S, which I ordered on Friday. I wasn’t expecting to need a new phone so soon but sadly my current iPhone 5 is not in a good way.

The need to upgrade

I bought my iPhone 5, along with a new two-year contract, in September 2012, shortly after launch. My iPhone 4 had pretty much conked out: it kept randomly rebooting, and was getting rather slow. However, by September 2014, my iPhone 5 was still in good shape. Sure, the battery life wasn’t as good but it still worked fine. So instead I took out a new 12 month SIM-only contract with the intention of keeping my iPhone 5 until next year.

Unfortunately, more recently, my iPhone 5 has developed a fault with the Lightning port. It will only charge if I plug a cable in at a certain angle – and if the cable becomes even slightly loose, it won’t charge. Whilst I can usually get the cable in a good enough position to charge it at home, it’s almost impossible to do when out and about unless you actually hold the cable in position. And there have been several occasions when the cable has been knocked slightly and I’ve ended up starting the day with a phone on 30% battery.

It’s been like this for a while but it seems to have got worse of late. I’ve tried cleaning out the Lightning port as best I can, and I’ve used many different cables, but it still doesn’t work properly.

It may be fixable, but as the battery life isn’t great either, I decided that really, I’d be best with a new phone.

Rule-breaking

Co-incidentally, I recently received an ‘exclusive’ offer from Three, the network I’m with, to upgrade early to a new iPhone 6. Normally ending my contract now, and not when it ends in September, would incur a penalty, but Three were willing to waive these charges if I signed a new two-year contract with them. I registered my details on their ‘rulebreakers’ page and got a call back later on Thursday to discuss the deal.

The offer was for a brand new iPhone 6, in my choice of colour, at no up-front cost, with a 2-year contract that included 2 GB of data (including tethering), unlimited calls, unlimited text messages and a few other perks. The catch was that the monthly charge would be £46 per month, and it was only the 16 GB model. I’m currently paying £18 per month for a SIM-only deal so this would be a huge hike in my monthly payments – more than 2.5 times higher.

But I agreed to it – I needed a new phone, and I’d be getting Apple’s latest and greatest model. Even though I had the opportunity to home test an iPhone 6 in September, and found it rather too big for my liking.

Cutting too many corners

At first, I didn’t think the lack of storage would be an issue. My iPad Mini 2 is the 16 GB model, and whilst I don’t have much space left on it, it does just about everything that I need it for.

My iPhone 5, however, is the 64 GB model. And it turns out I was using half of the space on it. At first I thought these were things I could do without – a 2.5 GB full HD quality episode of Sherlock, for example. But after deleting the stuff I didn’t use, and then the stuff I occasionally used, and then stuff that I didn’t really want to delete but would do if I absolutely had to, I was still using over 20 GB of space. Essentially, if I wanted to get by on a 16 GB phone, I’d have to make do with not having all the apps I wanted, all my photos, or all of my music. And it’d be a compromise that I’d have to live with for the two years of the contract. A contract that would be costing me over £1000 over the two years.

The lack of storage might not have been so bad if it weren’t for the limited data allowance as well. Whilst I’ve only ever used more than 2 GB in a month once or twice, if I have less storage capacity on my phone then I’d need to store more data in the cloud, which would eat further into my data allowance. A small capacity phone and unlimited internet might have worked, as would a large capacity phone and limited internet, but not the worst of both.

Cooling off

I’m fortunate, in some respects, that I’d agreed to this over the phone, which meant that I was legally entitled to a 14-day ‘cooling off’ period, as per the Consumer Contracts Regulations. And in fairness to Three, they made me fully aware of my rights to cancel on the phone call and what to do. So on Friday I called them, and cancelled the upgrade, which was done without any fuss. After all, I’ll still have a contract with them until September. The iPhone 6 had already been dispatched at this point, so I’ll need to refuse the delivery when it comes today.

With that sorted, I ordered a new 32GB iPhone 5S direct from Apple. Whilst not as big as my current 64 GB model, I can comfortably get by with 32 GB of space – and Apple doesn’t offer larger storage on the 5S anymore. It cost £499, which I can pay off from my credit card over the next few months, and even with a bit of interest, it’ll save me around £180 over two years, assuming that I stay on an £18 per month contract. And the phone is unlocked too – whilst I’m happy with Three and don’t intend to switch networks, if I do, then I can take my phone with me.

I also prefer the size of the iPhone 5S to the 6. I’m not bothered about a bigger screen and would prefer a device that I can use with one hand, for the times when I’m standing on a train and need to hold onto a grabrail, for example. Whilst it is last year’s model, Apple tend to offer updates for 3-4 years after release, so it should be good until September 2018. And there aren’t many other improvements to the iPhone 6 that are relevant to me: I don’t have any 802.11ac wifi devices and Apple Pay hasn’t been launched here yet.

With hindsight I should have turned down the ‘rulebreaker’ deal in the first place, as soon as I heard it was a 16 GB model, but I guess desperation got the better of me. I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to cancel without penalty, and been able to find a solution that serves me better. Even if it does mean using last year’s model.

Making do with last year’s model

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Nokia 100 and Apple iPhone 5

It’s almost August, so I’m within a couple of months of my initial 24 month mobile phone contract with Three coming to an end. I bought my iPhone 5, along with a new contract, in September 2012.

At the time I decided to go for a new contract because my current phone at the time, an iPhone 4, was not in a good state. It would randomly reboot around once a week, and sometimes when it came back up it would ask to be connected to iTunes, as if it hadn’t been activated. The battery life was starting to get rather poor by this point as well. Rather than spend money on a new battery and hope that it would also fix the reboot problem, I decided to take advantage of the launch of the iPhone 5 and just get a new phone. And because iPhones are so expensive when bought without a contract, I took on a new two year contract at the same time.

This time, my iPhone 5 is in a better state by comparison. Admittedly it too doesn’t have the same battery life as it did when I got it, but that is to be expected, and I have backup batteries in both my usual bags to top it up if needed (which actually isn’t that often). It’s as reliable as it was when I got it, and thanks to the improvements in iOS 7, it’s more useful now than it was two years ago. And iOS 8 will hopefully make it even better.

So, unless the rumoured iPhone 6 is amazing and has must-have features, I’ll sit it out and stick with my current model for the next twelve months. Not only will I not have the upfront cost of a new handset but a SIM-only contract will be much cheaper – around £14 per month instead of the £34 per month I’m paying now, saving me £240 over the year, or £5 per week.

Christine is in a similar position with her phone as well, so hopefully between us we’ll have the capacity to save quite a bit of money over the next year. There’s no point having the latest and greatest model if the current one works fine, and does everything I need it to. I’d rather have the extra money.

Windows 8 Installation Experience

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A screenshot of Windows 8 being installed on a VirtualBox virtual machine running on a Mac

On Saturday, I decided to upgrade to Windows 8. I’ve been running a virtual machine with Windows Vista Business for some time, firstly in Parallels Desktop but later converted to VirtualBox. I never bothered upgrading to Windows 7 due to the lack of differences between the two; obviously 7 is a big upgrade from XP but not from Vista.

Another major factor is that, at the moment, existing Windows XP, Vista and 7 users can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for a mere £24.99 as a digital download, or more if you need it on DVD. It’s a very good deal, but it’s only valid until early next year. And since I’d also heard that Windows 8 should run faster on the same hardware, upgrading seemed like a really good idea.

To upgrade, you should download the Upgrade Assistant which checks your current installation for compatibility and then downloads the files. You can then either proceed with the upgrade, or save an ISO file to a USB drive or DVD-ROM. I decided to proceed, but told the installer not to keep any of my documents or settings; after all, it was a virtual machine and anything important had been saved to Dropbox and was therefore available elsewhere.

This turned out to be a mistake, frankly. It installed the files, restarted a couple of times, and then froze. No animation, no CPU activity, no disk activity. So, I hard reset the virtual machine. At which point, setup decided that the installation had failed, and set about restoring Windows Vista. So, after a few hours, I was back at square one.

This time, I told the installer to save the ISO file, which I placed in a shared folder so it was accessible by my Mac as well. I then shut down the virtual machine, and created a fresh, new VM in VirtualBox with the optimal Windows 8 settings. Bear in mind that my previous VM was originally a Parallels VM, was then converted to the VMWare format, and then used with VirtualBox 2; now I’m on VirtualBox 4.2. I mounted the ISO file mounted as the CD drive, booted up, followed the instructions, and within the hour I was up and running with Windows 8. Success!

…or so I thought. Opening the ‘classic’ desktop environment saw the little icon for the Windows Action Centre pop up, telling me I needed to activate Windows – which was odd because I had entered the product key during installation. So I re-entered it, only for Windows to pop up a 0xC004F601 error, telling me that the product key was only valid for upgrades and not a clean installation like this one.

Some expletives were issued by me at this point, but thankfully Google saved my sanity as I found this blog post which explained a workaround. I had to edit the registry to change a value, re-run the activation manager and then reboot, but after this Windows activated with no problems. Phew.

Obviously I still have the old Windows Vista VM lying around but as that license is now invalid due to the upgrade I’ll be deleting it. That, and I shouldn’t need it anyway.

I’ll write more about my actual experiences of using Windows 8 when I’ve had a longer opportunity to use it. So far, it seems okay, and the ‘classic’ desktop is almost exactly the same as Windows 7. I’ll have to play with the new desktop (formally known as ‘Metro’) a little more before passing judgement.

Mac OS X Lion – first impressions

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A screenshot of Preferences in Mac OS X Lion

I made the plunge and installed Mac OS X Lion last night. The install takes a little under an hour all in all, including 2 reboots. During the second phase, i.e. between the two reboots, you can pop open a log file viewer which shows you what it’s actually doing, of which at least 10 minutes is spent running an fsck check on your disk and then creating the recovery partition, which you can use in case your Mac won’t boot properly. (In the past, you would have used the install DVD for Mac OS X, but as Lion is a digital download you won’t have this option anymore).

Anyhow, the install went okay, so here are my first impressions:

  1. Natural Scrolling – I immediately turned off ‘natural’ scrolling, because it felt like anything but natural. I suppose I could have tried to get used to it, but I use a Windows machine at work which has a scrollwheel that works the ‘classic’ way and would rather have consistency. It’s bad enough having to cope with two different keyboard layouts. Natural scrolling is fine on touchscreen devices like the iPhone but I just don’t think it works with a mouse and separate screen.
  2. Scrollbars – I’m very much against Apple’s decision to hide scrollbars by default, and only show them once you already start scrolling – how do you know whether to scroll something if there are no scrollbars? So I’ve told Lion to always show them. On the other hand, I do like the new minimalist look of the scrollbars.
  3. New theme – Lion brings a lighter and more understated look to its windows than Snow Leopard. I like it on the whole, barring the lack of colour in some places and the very light colouring of the new title bars. I’ll probably get used to it though.
  4. Mission Control – liking this so far – really improves on Exposé, and still very quick.
  5. Launchpad – a good feature, but poorly implemented. When you install Lion, it enumerates all of the applications in your /Applications/ folder and subfolders, and then adds them all, putting the apps that came with OS X on the first page. Problem is that it includes all of your applications, including uninstallers, patches for World of Warcraft and other stuff that just doesn’t need to be there, and, as I mentioned, Apple’s own apps are on the first page regardless of whether you’ve used them or not (which in the case of iDVD, iMovie, Garageband etc., is never). What’s worse is most apps cannot be deleted from Launchpad unless you downloaded them from the Mac App Store, and for most long-term Mac users this isn’t the case. I hope an update will allow you to remove any kind of app and have more intelligent sorting, based on actual use, when Lion is installed over an existing installation – I’d consider these to be quite major bugs. As it was, I had to spend quite a bit of time moving things around to suit me, although now that I’ve done that it works well as a way of accessing programs that aren’t important enough for the Dock but still need to be within easy reach.
  6. Mac App Store – I found the App Store application to be a bit slow and unresponsive in Snow Leopard; unfortunately this hasn’t been fixed in Lion. Frequently when I click on one of the 5 tabs at the top, it does nothing but show the spinning beach ball of doom for a few seconds. Some visual feedback registering my click, and a change of the content pane to ‘Loading’ would feel much better. Also, if the App Store is now the preferred way of installing new applications, then Apple need to do more to help developers grandfather their existing users into it – i.e. if you’ve bought a program before the App Store, then you should be allowed to have a special code to switch to the App Store version without paying for it again, for example. This would be especially useful for programs like Adobe PhotoShop Elements for which I have the retail copy and don’t want to spend another £55 on the App Store version.
  7. Full screen apps – not had much chance to use this as only Apple’s own apps support it right now. Where I have used it, it seems to work okay but is a little slow due to the animations – or at least it is on my 2009-era Mac Mini. Faster animations, like with Mission Control, would have been better. Getting out of full-screen is also a little unintuitive as you have to hold your mouse at the top of the screen to show the menu bar – Apple would have been better having the close button in the same place on the window itself.
  8. Apple Mail – since this got some love in this update, I decided to give it a try and see how it stacked up to Thunderbird. I wasn’t really impressed – it’s a bit ugly now that Apple have removed all the colour from it, and the fonts didn’t seem to render very well in the mail listing pane. Although it started up quickly, I found it slow when working with multiple IMAP accounts in comparison to Thunderbird.
  9. New voices – You can now download several extra voices for the text-to-speech feature. I downloaded ‘Serena’, a British English voice that sounds like a Radio 4 newsreader. It’s a big improvement on the existing voices, sounding more natural and less robotic than ‘Alex’ which was the voice added in Leopard, although it’s not quite perfect yet. New voice packs are a 200+ MB download though.
  10. iTunes – just a note that if you installed iTunes 10.4 before installing Lion, you’ll need to do so again as Lion will revert it back to 10.3 for you, and it’ll throw back an error when you try to launch it saying that your library is for a newer version. Again, hopefully a 10.7.1 will correct this.
  11. Software issues – only major software issue I’ve encountered is with NTFS-3G, which allows read/write access to NTFS volumes using MacFUSE. MacFUSE itself needs an obscure beta version to work, but even then NTFS-3G will sometimes pop up an error when mounting an NTFS volume. However, in my limited testing it was still able to write to NTFS volumes. There’s also some niggles with Dropbox – it works okay but some smaller features are missing. A beta update is available.
  12. Bigger desktop icons – something I noticed was that icons that appear on the desktop are larger than before. I think I preferred them smaller.
  13. Performance – I haven’t noticed any real differences in performance, bar some initial sluggishness whilst Spotlight rebuilds its database which may take an hour or two after installation is complete. Previous OS X updates have brought minor speed improvements, the lack of perfomance improvements in Lion is therefore a bit of a shame.
  14. Resume, Autosave and Versions – none of the apps I use support this yet, so I haven’t tried it. However, NeoOffice will support these features in a beta version due out next month.

On the whole? I’m slightly underwhelmed as I can only see myself regularly using a few of the new features. There are also a few niggles that Apple should sort out, as well as some bizarre and unintuitive user interface changes. In Lion, Apple’s direction was to let the computer get out of the way of the user, yet the ‘bugs’ in Launchpad, natural scrolling, no scrollbars by default and my issues with full screen applications actually get in the way of the user, in my opinion. But, it’s early days, and this is a .0 release. Allegedly 10.7.2 is already available to developers so 10.7.1 must be on the way soon and will hopefully alleviate some of these issues. My advice would be to wait a bit.

More on the upgrade

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As promised, here is more about the upgrade I did to my parents’ computer last weekend.

The computer will be 4 years old in October and I wanted to sort out its current shortcomings while also making it capable of running for at least another 2-3 years. The agreed budget was £100, about 6 times less than the original cost of the computer.

In the end, we went for the following internal components:

  • 2 GB of Corsair Value Select PC3200 RAM
  • 256MB XFX nVidia GeForce 6200A AGP 4x/8x graphics card
  • A no-brand USB and FireWire PCI card

The memory was the most important part of the upgrade. Originally, the machine only had 512 MB of RAM, and as such was struggling. As a matter of principle I only buy Corsair or Crucial RAM as I know it’s good quality, and on this instance I went for Corsair as it was slightly cheaper and could be shipped as part of the same order from Scan. It was still the most costly aspect of the upgrade at £39.32 (ex VAT), taking the majority of the £100 budget.

Next was the graphics card. Right now the machine has onboard VIA graphics, which can do some basic 3D but not much more (it will just about handle the original World of Warcraft with all of the effects turned off, but it’s not pretty), and it leeches system RAM rather than having its own. Furthermore, the manufacturer has not produced any new drivers for Windows Vista. So, as part of my plan to keep the machine running for a few years, allowing for a potential Vista upgrade is important. I doubt nVidia are due to disappear any time soon, so hopefully this new card will be a safe bet. It also adds DVI and S-Video output, allowing connection to a TV or a more modern TFT screen.

Finally, I added a USB and FireWire PCI card. The machine had 2 USB ports at the front and 2 at the back, but both of those at the back were full and my parents were already having to use a hub. The machine is due to be moved to a room where there is no wired socket for Ethernet, so we’ve opted to go for a USB wireless dongle (the Netgear WG111 previously mentioned), so that would be another USB port used up. As an extra PCI card was only around £5, it made sense to add 4 more ports. It also adds 2 FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) ports, which the computer previously lacked; whether my parents will ever use them is perhaps questionable but at least they are there, and it may add resale value to the machine.

These 3 items, plus the Netgear dongle, packing and VAT, came to £100.19, so only a bit over budget 🙂 . The difference is very noticeable – startup times are improved and general performance is much better. The machine is now almost ready for Windows Vista – the only device lacking a Vista-compatible driver is the internal modem, which isn’t in use anyway and could be removed if necessary (it’s made by SmartLink who sold their assets to Connexant in 2006, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Their latest drivers don’t even work correctly with Windows XP SP2).

Stop… upgrade time!

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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?

Hari’s new graphics card

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Hari’s new graphics card has arrived, and so I fitted it earlier today. We went with an Inno3D card based around an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS chipset, since it seemed to represent the best value for money for our budget and was compatible with Hari’s computer – it doesn’t have PCI Express so we needed an AGP card.

As performance goes, the card is an immense improvement. Using World of Warcraft as a benchmark, before, she was getting an average of between 10 and 12 frames per second with all the settings turned down for maximum performance (but low detail). With the new card, she gets a constant 50fps, with many of the enhancements enabled, such as texture detail, terrain distance and spell effects. It looks fantastic, and is very smooth.

This now means that Hari finally has the gaming performance that she’s been wanting for so long, and ends an upgrade process that has seen a new external hard drive, new memory and now a new graphics card. All in all, we’ve spent £220 on new hardware, but seeing as it’ll add value to the computer, and make it less obsolete in future, it should be worth it.

Or, at least, it ends for now. She now wants a new power supply so that her graphics card can run at maximum performance. I think we can pass on that.

Actually, I didn’t realise that the card needs to have a direct connection to the power supply as well as being connected to the motherboard through the AGP socket. I’ll get it sorted soon.

Graphics card recommendations

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It now looks like Hari needs a new graphics card. The extra memory arrived yesterday, as expected, and has made something of a difference to the computer. Switching between World of Warcraft and any other program is instantaneous, whereas it used to take several seconds and result in considerable hard disk noise (presumably Windows swapping data between physical and virtual memory). Plus, aspects of Warcraft, such as navigating around cities and instances is noticeably smoother. But there’s no real improvement to the number of frames per second it can manage during general play. Which was one of the main aims of the upgrade – the other being preparation for the eventual installation of Windows Vista.

Having looked at the recommended requirements of World of Warcraft, it looks like it’s Hari’s graphics card which is to blame. She has a card based around the nVidia GeForce 5200 FX chipset, with 128 MB of graphic memory. It’s not a bad card, but it’s likely to be missing some of the advanced features which more modern cards have, which in turn puts more pressure on the CPU and slows the whole computer down.

Overall, her computer spec is as follows:

  • 2.80 GHz Pentium 4 processor
  • 80 GB hard drive, with an additional 80 GB external hard disk
  • 2 GB of Corsair memory
  • 128 MB nVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card
  • Windows XP Home Edition SP2

(plus all of the usual gubbins like a DVD rewriter and Ethernet)

The processor should be fine – World of Warcraft only requires a good 800MHz processor and recommends 1.5 GHz. Furthermore, CPU usage is relatively good – we ran Task Manager last night while she was playing and it rarely went over 80%, averaging about 50% – if it was close to 100% a lot then I’d be more worried. We can’t fit any more RAM as 2 GB is the maximum it can take, but judging by our experiences with the new RAM so far adding even more wouldn’t have made much difference. The internal hard disk should also be fine as it has plenty of free space (though it may need defragmenting, I can’t see it making a huge difference).

Software-wise I have done almost all I can. Though Hari is not a computing student, she is very computer literate and knows the risks of viruses and spyware and so she has AVG and Windows Defender running (as well as Spybot and Ad-Aware). There’s very few background applications running, and even if they were, they’d be using RAM and CPU which we know aren’t issues.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the graphics card is the weakest link. I’ve upgraded it to the latest Forceware drivers, but I honestly don’t think it has made a difference to performance. If we’re going to get decent Warcraft performance, it will probably need to be replaced.

Whatever the replacement is, the main limitations will be that it has to be AGP – the motherboard does not support PCI Express – and that it only takes up one slot as the computer has a small form factor case. Though there is space for a card which takes up the equivalent of two slots, it would render the only PCI slot useless – admittedly it is empty now but it could be used for something in the future.

You may wonder why we’re spending all this money on an old machine – after all, we could probably get a new one for the money spent so far (about £150). But there’s not much fundamentally wrong with the core components, and a few upgrades should make it very powerful. I also doubt that the money would get a computer designed for the uses it would get, i.e. gaming.

It’s unlikely that we will buying a new graphics card just yet – it’s likely to be later in the yeah when Hari has some more money. But I’d like to know if you all think I’m right with diagnosing the problem, and if you have any recommendations for good graphics cards, preferably ones under £75.

Memory upgrade question

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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.