6/4/07

In one month I will be headed to the Tail of the Dragon thing with Pat. I imaging we’ll be on the road at this time of day. I was thinking this morning that on the Fourth of July ten years ago he and I, along with his wife, went to Roswell New Mexico for the fiftieth anniversary of the UFO crash. I wonder where we’ll be going ten years from now. I tell you what, if I do live to be 81, I plan to go to the 100^th anniversary of that crash in Roswell, that’s for sure. Ok, enough of that, let’s see what happened over the weekend. John called Friday evening to ask if I was willing to forego the shop in favor of seeing “Shrek the Third” with him and his youngest. The wife had the older son at some baby shower or something. I agreed and we set a tentative 1400 h movie time. Saturday morning I decided to go see about adding some memory to this laptop to make it work a little faster. Ryan had taken a look at the operating system, or something, and told me that the RAM, or something, was totally occupied with the various applications, or something, that were running all the time and that it was having to page, or something, to the hard drive to make stuff run, or something. I packed up the laptop and headed to the CompUSA store where I had bought it, but found them to be closed. I moved on to Best Buy instead. I wandered around in the computer section before I noticed the Geek Squad desk. I waited for the next available geek and when asked how he could help I told him. I said, “My laptop is slow and I was told I need more RAM.” He asked if I had it with me so I went back out to the car to get it. When I came back there was another line so I waited. My geek saw me at the front of the line and said I could go ahead and set it up on the counter and he’d look at it when he finished with the current customer. I did set it up and found the page Ryan had been looking at. When the geek came over he went to “My Computer” and looked at the “General System Properties” page. I just looked it up. I didn’t remember any of that BS. He saw that I had 256 flippy-floppies, or what the hell ever the unit of measurement is, of RAM. He said Windows requires 256 flippy-floppies just to run. “You do need more RAM,” he said. Well, he might have said, “You could use more RAM.” But the gist is still the same. He suggested 512 flippy-floppies in addition to the 256 I had. I said, “Ok, let’s do it.” He looked up the part I'd need then we went to the display to find it. They had it for $69.99 or something. I asked, “If 512 is good, would more be better?” He said that there are units with more but he wasn’t sure if there was one for my machine. “512,” he said, “is going to be three times faster than what you have now.” I was sold. He asked if I wanted to install it or have him do it. I had him do it for an additional $40.00 or so. Watching the process, I know I could have done it. Thing is, I wouldn’t have had a clue how to before seeing him do it. It’s a “Catch 22” sort of situation. Besides, I was under the impression, from what Ryan had said, that I'd have to take out the existing RAM to install the new one. That was not the case. It popped in on top of the existing one. He fired it up again to make sure the system, or something, recognized the new part. It now indicates 704 flippy-floppies of RAM, as opposed to the 205 it had before. Is it any faster? Not that I can tell, but it probably is. Who knows? After that, I went downtown to meet John and Lucas at Pizzaria Uno. We ate and then went next door to the movie. It was quite amoosing. Perhaps I'll give a review of it sometime. From the movie we went to John's house so I could pick up the alternator. The plan was to try and install it on Sunday but I'll tell that story tomorrow. Well, I think I'm just about talked out for the day. Toodles.