New life for an old friend

I am a happy camper at the moment. I wonder how long it will take for someone to kill that mood. My old computer has been running extremely slow. I have had to stop programs, especially Firefox. Firefox is notorious for taking up a lot of memory as time goes on. My old computer is an IBM NetVista I bought refurbished in 2001. It only had 128 meg of RAM, an 800mHz processor, and a 20 gig hard drive. It was a lot faster than the computer I was using at the time and was not bad for its time. Over the years, this computer has served me well.

For several months, the computer has been running pretty slow and causing me to send forth many horrible verbalizations in its direction. I have been cussing out this slooooow computer for months and threatening to replace it with a new one. I bought a new laptop in November and really didn't want to buy another machine yet.

Some time ago, I researched the cost of a memory upgrade for this machine. The max it can take is 512 meg of RAM. The cost of just another 128 meg stick was around $80 because of the fact that it was an older machine and the specific memory for this machine was hard to find. Last week, I found that The Memory Store had much cheaper memory prices now. I picked up two 256 strips for about the same cost as I had previously found for just one more 128 meg strip.

Just a few minutes ago, I checked the mail, found the package from The Memory Store, and I was happy. I just added the new memory and it now boots faster, runs programs faster, and am elated. My work laptop has the same amount of memory and operating system, and runs much faster than this one did. Now I am looking forward to better performance from my old buddy. By the way, the picture shows the same sort of tower in black. Mine is actually beige instead of what you see in the picture, but you get the idea.

I have been resistant to ditching this computer since I am familiar with and still like Windows 2000, all of my email, web page authoring software, audio software, and better audio card are on this machine. Anyway, back to smiling and working on other things.