Thursday May 8
 
23:34
 
Sleep N Shake

Last night was the worst earthquake I’ve felt in Tokyo. Again, it was during the night and it woke me up – and it seemed to last forever. Just when I thought it had stopped, a few minutes later it would start back up again. It was very scary.

My computers seem to be having similar ups and downs. After the problems with the Acer, today I was playing with my Kohjinsha SA1 – increasing the Video RAM in BIOS and plugging in an external monitor – and I managed to bluescreen it. Continually. As soon as Windows started, it would find a new USB peripheral (why?!), then crash. Thankfully after switching it off and leaving it cold for 15 minutes, it recovered. I guess after allocating more memory to the graphics card in bios, some garbage must have been left in memory somewhere that caused problems. Who knows.

Then I came home, and as I was playing with my LG laptop (LW25), I noticed that the fan wasn’t on. I tried toggling the fan speed and no joy, so I turned it over and looked at the fan. There looked to be a little bit of dust, so I got a toothpick and pulled out… what can only be described as a hairball.

There’s a cat living inside my LG.

The fan started to whizz away again. I wonder how long it has been like that? I noticed it had been getting hot lately, but I thought it was just normal heat from being switch on all the time. Now that I feel the laptop being cool again, I wonder what damage I – or the cat – has done.

Spurred on by a bit of success, I decided to take a big risk. My LG has 2GB of memory – 2 x 1GB. According to the online documentation and everything that I can find on the LW25 on the internet, the maximum memory is 2GB – but then again, the online documentation says my computer has a Pentium M, and that’s poppycock. It has a 2GHz Core Duo.

I read elsewhere that some manufacturers specified “maximum RAM” not by what the BIOS or motherboard actually allows, but by what chips were available at the time of machine launch. Since I have a 2GB module hanging around from the Acer – the one that I bought to put in the Acer – I thought I’d whack it in the LG and see what happened. If all went well, I’d have 3GB (2GB + 1GB). If all went tits up, I’d have a burning mess.

With my luck with computers lately, it probably wasn’t a good thing to experiment with – potentially blowing up my long-time-reliable PC – but it worked. I now have 3GB running quite happily. It’s also a relief because I did wonder whether the 2GB card was dodgy and had caused the Acer problems, but since it’s working fine in the LG, I know that the card is OK (I also used ran the Microsoft memory test program that comes on the Vista DVD to verify the chip was OK in the Acer and it gave no errors – but I still had slight worries until now).

My experience with the Acer was annoying – I thought I’d be left with a non-refundable 2GB memory chip, as well as the time I wasted – but as things have turned out, it’s thanks to the Acer that I realised I could upgrade my LG to 3GB, and my Kohjinsha to 1GB. So even though I lost 3+ days out my life, I’ll hopefully gain them back slowly through increased computer performance ;)