Thursday, July 24, 2008

It's amazing what 2 gigs can do...

My dad is a computer nerd...and of course, growing up I was a computer nerd myself (for instance, I had my own Texas Instruments computer and went to TI User Group meetings with my dad when I was about 5 or 6)...I built my own computer in high school, and never bought a computer out of a box until I got this one in 2003. Of course, I had my dad help me figure out what to get so it wouldn't become obsolete too soon.

But recently, hubby and I have been grumbling and contemplating getting a new computer...Surely those dual processor things work faster than this...not to mention we were always getting warnings about not enough virtual memory, even though we appeared to have drive space.

So, when my parents came out to visit us last week (the first time they've come out since Christmas 2006...of course, the whole cancer treatments for 6 months were a pretty good reason...but they really haven't had a good excuse not to come for a while now.) I had my dad look over our computer to see what the problem might be. He did all sorts of stuff that I probably would have understood a dozen years ago, but I don't really understand now. He made it so the virtual memory pulls from both drives, stopped all the animations, which look cool but are pretty useless (like when you watch a window shrink or grow...ours now just pop up) and ordered me some new memory sticks for my birthday (not til next month, but I'm not complaining!)

So, the two sticks of 1 GB memory each arrived the other day, but since I've been very busy baking for fair, I didn't foresee myself getting the memory in until the weekend, at least...however, hubby went on strike and told me that I need to scratch off some of my fair entries (to be fair, I guess I did do a bunch of canning, so that's three entries I wasn't counting on...I pulled out some scrapbooking pages for the scrapbooking contest...and I made banana bread for the first time since Charlotte's birth, as I think this is the first time we've had overripe bananas since then!) So, we got the memory in, and we are both just floored at what a difference it is making. Web pages even load more quickly! (We just assumed everything was so very slow because of dial up Internet...it's still not fast, but until we break down and get high speed Internet, it will do!)

Back to baking!

2 comments:

Christine said...

That must make blog reading so much easier. Good luck with all of your entries (I know I've already said that, and I'll probably say it again, it's so exciting that you enter fairs)

Bret K. said...

actually, this was posted by MM (as you careful blog-readers have probably already deduced). we haven't quite worked out all the bugs of switching user names and whatnot yet. my dad is most definitely NOT a computer nerd, although he now uses it to check weather, livestock markets, etc. and even to buy cattle. not so long ago he was pretty dang hostile to the whole internet thing, so this is pretty amazing.