Time for it to go

My main desktop computer at home has almost outlived its usefulness. Only God knows how long I've owned it. I can't even remember myself. However, it really must have been quite a while ago because it's using the very old Pentium4 processor and its memory is a grand total of (gasp) 768MB. It takes me ages to boot it up and then it opens programs at its own sweet pace.

I've another desktop computer at home. It's slightly - but only slightly - newer than my main machine but unfortunately, it's broken down beyond repair.

Last night, I thought that I could perhaps salvage something from the second desktop and use it for the first one. So I stripped it of its harddisk and two pieces of 512MB DIMM memory chips, and tried to instal them into the main desktop. Nuts. The settings must be wrong because it now refused to recognise my DVD-drive and the extra harddisk. Nothing else that I could do but to switch the cables back to the original configuration.

But at least I had a partial success with my memory chips. After a lot of physical push, I managed to increase the memory from 768MB to 1GB. Wahhh, a 33% memory upgrade! And mmm, I could detect a oh-so-very-slight better response. But I still have two unused DIMM cards with another 768MB of memory. For all they were worth, they resisted my efforts to push them into the remaining slots. I could not get the clips to catch properly at both ends. And then I discovered the reason. My two DIMMs had only one notch each while on the motherboard, the slots had two notches. Absolutely incompatible, like pushing square pegs into round holes. So much for all my sweat and effort, I've only slightly improved the darn machine to 1GB of memory. It's still agonisingly slow to boot up.

I think it's time to build a new machine or otherwise, my wife will grumble that she cannot use the computer at all. Sigh....