[SGVLUG] Memory upgrades (was: Laptop memory question...)

[David Lawyer]

On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 09:11:33AM -0700, Emerson, Tom wrote:
> > --- Tom Emerson <osnut at pacbell.net> wrote:
> > > NOT support more than 512 meg -- "that is all it was designed for".
> > 
> > I have had excellent luck with crucial.com ...

I'm running my Gateway PC with 16+16 + 8+8 = 48 MB of memory but the
largest simm (72-pin fast paged) possible is 32 MB so I could upgrade
to have 16+16 + 32+32 = 96 MB, thus doubling the memory.  crucial.com
has it for $54/chip.  So by spending over $100 on memory, will my PC
be worth $100 more?  It has a 100 MHz, Pentium I CPU and has one of
the IDE interfaces broken, likely due to plugging in the IDE ribbon
cable reversed by mistake.  So it may not be worth much ($10 ?).

But dealnews.com sells the "same" chip for $8 but calls it "generic".
I guess this means that it's lower quality than Frys which I've never
bought anything from.  I'm afraid to try it.  The performance of my PC
is fast in "command line interface" which I use most of the time, and
it's also fast with the Dillo (no Java Sc.) browser, but it's very
slow with Mozilla (which I have to use about once a month since it has
Java Script, etc).  Even if I upgraded it might still be slow with
Mozilla, etc.

I've got some quasi-extra 64 MB simms.  What would happen if I put
them into slots where the max memory is 32 MB/simm ?  Would the memory
be useable at all?  Regarding getting another PC, I would like to find
a better used one for about $15 and that uses very little electricity
but it's probably not worthwhile looking for.  I bought my current PC
4 years ago for $10 (the most I ever paid for a PC) and have gotten a
lot of use out of it.

I'm used to running with low memory since for almost 10 years I used a
Unix-like workstation with only 512 KB of memory (1/2 MB).  Very low
memory (like 1/2 MB) forces one to take a lot of breaks since some
tasks take several minutes to execute: spell checking a long document,
compiling source code, etc.  Now I sometimes sit for hours at a time
with no breaks and this is bad.  

			David Lawyer