Archive for June 18th, 2003
RAM is good.
Wednesday, June 18th, 2003
Yes indeed, RAM is a good thing. I just got an extra 512MB of Crucial PC2700 DDR, and man can I feel the difference. I added it to my 256MB, so now I have a full 3/4ths of a gigabyte of RAM (I like saying it that way ;-). Everything is snappy. And I just now opened a 8.5×11″ 600 DPI (= 5100×6600 pixels) image in Photoshop, and I could work with it like it was 40×40 pixels or something. It just had enough RAM to store the entire thing. So then I opened up IE, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Outlook, Explorer, Windows Media Player 9, w.bloggar, and Solitare… while I still had that 600 DPI image up for editing. Photoshop still ran like it was the only thing running, and like the image was an icon. Then I opened up a web page, a word doc, an excel doc, a publisher doc, a powerpoint presentation, a 300 DPI 8.5×11 fireworks image, a flash movie, a Dreamweaver site, checked my email, browsed my music files, played some mp3’s, played a few seconds of solitare and am currently writing this. And it’s fast. Real fast. Everything is still open. Amazing.
I did have some trouble when I first installed the RAM. It turns out that I had my old stick of 256 in slot number 3 of my motherboard’s RAM slots…. I’m suprised it worked, because (naturally) when I tried to install the stick of 512 in slot #2 next to it, I couldn’t boot windows there were so many memory corruption errors. So I switched their order, and Windows booted, but around every corner, I got a blue screen or a program error complaining about corruption of some file. It took me a while to figure out that the files were just corrupted in memory and not on the disk, so I tool a look inside the case. I looked at the type on the motherboard and read “DIMM1, DIMM2, DIMM3″ next to each RAM slot. Stuck the 512 in #1, the 256 in #2, and everything is rock solid stable. Motherboards are just picky I guess.
On a side-note, the developers of Star Wars Galaxies have finally announced their release date. It’s just as I had predicted: the 26th of June. Hooray.
I’ve been lazy and vegetable-like lately. The only exercise I got today was riding my bike to the bank and to the computer shop down the street to get RAM. How geeky is that? But that was worth it 
Definately. I’ll get off my ass soon enough. Tomorrow, even. I’m going to work on my mom’s web site like mad; put this RAM to good use. (But I guess that’s not really getting off my ass… just figuratively in the sense that it won’t be lazy… yeah)… Laters. ::