May 26, 2003

Weekend Wrap Up

Well, not much of a weekend. Spent Saturday with my daughter cleaning the garage and stuff. Went out to Langley on Saturday night to play some cards and visit with friends. Damn construction for the new Safeway almost had me bottom out my car when I went around the corner right into a huge pothole where they are doing road reconstruction.

On Sunday I was expecting to go see Bruce Almighty with some friends when they got back from Seattle (and pick up some much needed ram), but apparently they decided to go without me. Bastards. Fine... be that way. :P So instead I decided to work and sit in the bowels of my kernel debugger.

Picking up the ram is somewhat important. I put an order in with Arcterex when he went hardware hunting and picked up 512 Mb for like $75 bucks. Just got to get it from him now. (Assuming he hasn't stolen it to take to work so he can have some sort of working machine) That will bring up my total to either 1gig, or 768Mb, depending on if I can just add the stick, or have to pull one out. Haven't cracked the box yet to find out. There needs to be some sort of software to tell you the ram configuration WITHOUT having to crack the case. Be nice to tell you which bank has how much ram. Guess I will find out the hard way.

The amount of ram may seem excessive, until you realize right now I am burning through about 780Mb, which is swapping like crazy when you only have 512 Megs. Once you get your favorite Internet/email suite going, a vmware session going mad, Microsoft's compiler, WinDbg, about 5 bash/vim windows going (oh ya, and winamp) you start eating up anything you can get. I would upgrade the processor, but that would mean a new motherboard, and I can't afford that right now :(

Hopefully the bump in ram will help a bit. I don't really wanna buy a new machine until the Doom3 specs come out, as I just know that is where my next "gaming" bug will come from.

Until then, I guess I should get back to work. TTYL

Posted by SilverStr at May 26, 2003 10:27 AM
Comments

If it's winamp3 I'd suggest getting another 512 :)

Seriously though, a ram upgrade is the cheapest way to make a box faster, and these days it's so dog cheap.... wait another month and the cost for a half a gig will be half that and you'll be kicking yourself cause you'll be able to get a gig (or two, or three) for the same price. Gotta love computers eh?

Posted by: Arcterex at May 26, 2003 04:12 PM

Oh, and much as I'd love to steal the 512 for work, the POS box they have me on doesn't like pc133, only pc100. Now, as I have been told the ram's 100/133 rating is just that it can handle being run at that speed/voltage. Putting PC133 ram in a MB that can only do PC100 should make no diff right? Apparently not. Screw you HP!

/rant

Posted by: Arcterex at May 26, 2003 04:14 PM

Aye, HP/Compaqt have never been on my list of prebuilt systems to recommend.

Winamp3 isn't that bad. Mozilla takes 2-3 times as much memory... and all it's doing is a bunch of reading from HTTP/SMTP/IMAP sockets, and no sound. Why does it have to make things so complicated and bloated?

I wonder whether we'll see a day where computers don't really have hard drives, but just boot of the network, copy (via gigabit ether) a boot image to 50GB of ram, then work from there, periodically rsync'ing back to a central NAS?

Posted by: Wim at May 27, 2003 11:20 PM