Memory woes...
Jul/26/05 05:32 PM
This
weekend I made the long trek to the only Fry's
Electronics in the East Bay down in Fremont off of
Auto Mall Parkway. When I got out of the car, it felt
like I was wearing a big blanket of heat that
weighted about 40 pounds! I couldn't wait to get into
that big huge air-conditioned warehouse of tech
nyerdiness.
Once inside, I went straight for the memory counter. I first took care of my MMC card situation I blogged about earlier and purchased a 1 gb card for my Nokia 6620 and all is right with the MMC card and my phone.
Right then and there, I decided it was time to get some more RAM for my 1.5 GHz 15" G4 PowerBook laptop. A nice Fry's employee with a wandering eye for slender geek babes wandering around the store with their geeks in tow, asked me how he could help me and I said I needed some RAM for my pooter. Of course, I had to tell him when he asked what kind of memory I needed that I had a Mac. He didn't know what kind of RAM I needed so I went at his suggestion to the EarthLink computer center that has a browser on the internet and quickly navigated to www.crucial.com/ as instructed.
On this site, right in the middle of the page is a select manufacturer pop-up and so I chose Apple and clicked Go. On the second page, I selected PowerBook and clicked Go. On the third page, I clicked the PowerBook G4 1.5GHz (15" Display) and got a recommendation right there on the spot:
200 PIN SODIMM, DDR PC2700, CL=2.5, NON-ECC
I wrote all of this info down on a piece of paper and took it back to my salesperson and he started doing his thing on the Fry's supercomputer to find me a good price and a good size. I thought about getting the 1 gb RAM card but the price was more steep that I had expected [around $170] so I went for the 512MB card and after I got some official paperwork from the store employee, I was off to the impulse buy line where I grabbed a power strip, because we all know you can never have enough of those, and I promptly checked out.
When I got home, I turned of the Mac and got my trusty Mac under-carriage screwdriver out and started unscrewing until I had the memory compartment exposed and at that moment, I realized that I had made an unfortunate assumption about Apple and my computer's factory RAM configuration.
My mac came with 512MB of RAM from the factory. Since I got the 512MB card and I figured that Apple had only one RAM card with 512MB on it, I figured that getting the 512MB card would give me 1 gb total. Unfortunately, Apple instead put in two 256MB RAM cards. With laptops, space is at a premium so normally, you only get two slots, if that. Luckily, there's no parity issues anymore where you have to have the same sizes and speeds in two paired slots, but basically, instead of 1 gb of RAM, I now have only 768MB with the new 512MB stick installed and the other 256MB stick that was already in there. This is what I get for not checking the computer before I went to Fry's!
Hopefully, this little story will save someone else from making the same stupid mistakes that I make all the time and the crucial website is just that; crucial for finding out what kind of memory to purchase. Some of us have to learn the hard way I guess...
Once inside, I went straight for the memory counter. I first took care of my MMC card situation I blogged about earlier and purchased a 1 gb card for my Nokia 6620 and all is right with the MMC card and my phone.
Right then and there, I decided it was time to get some more RAM for my 1.5 GHz 15" G4 PowerBook laptop. A nice Fry's employee with a wandering eye for slender geek babes wandering around the store with their geeks in tow, asked me how he could help me and I said I needed some RAM for my pooter. Of course, I had to tell him when he asked what kind of memory I needed that I had a Mac. He didn't know what kind of RAM I needed so I went at his suggestion to the EarthLink computer center that has a browser on the internet and quickly navigated to www.crucial.com/ as instructed.
On this site, right in the middle of the page is a select manufacturer pop-up and so I chose Apple and clicked Go. On the second page, I selected PowerBook and clicked Go. On the third page, I clicked the PowerBook G4 1.5GHz (15" Display) and got a recommendation right there on the spot:
200 PIN SODIMM, DDR PC2700, CL=2.5, NON-ECC
I wrote all of this info down on a piece of paper and took it back to my salesperson and he started doing his thing on the Fry's supercomputer to find me a good price and a good size. I thought about getting the 1 gb RAM card but the price was more steep that I had expected [around $170] so I went for the 512MB card and after I got some official paperwork from the store employee, I was off to the impulse buy line where I grabbed a power strip, because we all know you can never have enough of those, and I promptly checked out.
When I got home, I turned of the Mac and got my trusty Mac under-carriage screwdriver out and started unscrewing until I had the memory compartment exposed and at that moment, I realized that I had made an unfortunate assumption about Apple and my computer's factory RAM configuration.
My mac came with 512MB of RAM from the factory. Since I got the 512MB card and I figured that Apple had only one RAM card with 512MB on it, I figured that getting the 512MB card would give me 1 gb total. Unfortunately, Apple instead put in two 256MB RAM cards. With laptops, space is at a premium so normally, you only get two slots, if that. Luckily, there's no parity issues anymore where you have to have the same sizes and speeds in two paired slots, but basically, instead of 1 gb of RAM, I now have only 768MB with the new 512MB stick installed and the other 256MB stick that was already in there. This is what I get for not checking the computer before I went to Fry's!
Hopefully, this little story will save someone else from making the same stupid mistakes that I make all the time and the crucial website is just that; crucial for finding out what kind of memory to purchase. Some of us have to learn the hard way I guess...