On Easter I was at my sister-in-laws place and she and her husband we continuing to complain about how slow their old Dell Dimension 3000 was/is. Having used the machine on occasion (to set their daughters up with their iPod Fatty's) I concurred. Being the somewhat power-y Mac user that I am that KNOWS to buy as much RAM as you can (regardless of system software), I had assumed that their XP installation was riddled with crap and anti-virus and that was what was slowing down the machine. Tracy then mentioned that she checked the RAm on the machine and it was listing 512mb.

"512mb?" I said. "You're joking right?"

"No"

"Well there in lies a big piece of your problem."

"So I should buy more" Jim said.

"Yes, as much as the machine will take."

"How do I know that?" was the obvious question from Jim......

I then spent the next few minutes at Dell's website researching what kind of RAM the 3000 took and how many slots. 2 slots, each capable of handling up to 1gb pc3200 300mhz srdam sticks. Cool. So that's what I told Jim. We checked some prices on-line and he bought two. Next he wanted to know how to change out the RAM. So I had him unplug everything and pull the box out of the shelf. I opened it up to show him the two slots with the one 512 stick that was in the machine.

Low and behold there were already two sticks in the machine. UT OH, I thought, one of the sticks is bad. I told Jim either one of the sticks was bad or one of the slots was bad. We reversed the two sticks in the slot and rebooted. Still only 512. Fuck, one of their RAM slots had gone south. He had two 1gb sticks on the way and couldn't cancel the order though he could return one. I told him that of course it might be possible to get the slot fixed but that would probably not be worth it. I told him to put one of the 1gb sticks in along side one of the 512s and see what the machine told him. If it was still 512, he coud just reverse the sticks and at least get 1gb. It would still improve things alot.

Three days pass....

Phone call: "Bill, I put in the 1gb stick like you said and the machine is reading 1.25gb...."

(Light bulb goes off in Bill's head!)

"Oh crap Jim, it never occurred to me that the 512 in your machine was actually two, 256 sticks! No worries Bud! Both slots are working, go ahead and put the other 1gb stick in and you should be golden at a full 2gb!"

One hour passes...

Phone call: "Bill, the second stick is in and Hannah is on the computer, iTunes cranked, iPod syncing, four IMs going and her little fingers are flying. We are set and working at 2gig."

"Excellent."


Post script: It never even occurred to me that the 2 sticks in the machine would only be 256s. I have been away from that kind of useage for so long. My mind just sat on two 512s with one broken in some manner as the base possibility. It also doesn't help that XP does not identify the breakdown of the RAM in per slot manner like Macs do, at least not in a way that I know where to find it in the XP system reporting tree.

All's well that ends well.