This author is currently on hiatus for the ignoble cause of mugging. The public is advised to remain calm, as this routine protocol has been shown to have no effect on one's violent tendencies in 96% of cases.
| Friday, October 27, 2006 |
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YAYYYY! I'm just kinda excited now. But anyway... MORE RAM FTW!!!! Yeah, went down to Sim Lim Square today by myself by MRT with a $100 budget. I was hunting for a new 512 RAM stick. I had already done some research beforehand, like checking out my RAM specs to see which type would be compatible, searching for the price range online and also checking out which store had it in stock (which turned out to be almost all, actually.) Scouted around and visited close to 8 stores, despite my hate for shopping. But the difference was that I only spent about a grand total of 1 min in each store. Each encounter would be more or less like this: Store Owner: "Yes?" Me: "I'm looking for PC3200 DDR SDRAM 512 MB. Do you sell it?" Store Owner: "Yes, it's x dollars." Me: "Okay, can I take a look at it?" *store owner passes me RAM stick and I quickly scan through its specs* Me: *passes back RAM stick* "Okay, I'll be back later, thanks." The only problem was that, out of 8 stores, I only got back to one of them. I think I spent more time walking around trying to find the stores than the amount of time I actually spent in there... And so I settled for an Infitron 512MB 400MHz PC400/3200 CL3.0 DDR SDRAM, reasonably priced at $88. Later, Jay was kind enough to drop by a visit to my house to help me install the RAM, with the extra service of helping me repartition my hard drive also. I was pretty amazed by all his periphals and software he brought along with him. He even had an external hard drive with Ubuntu (Linux-based OS) which he changed the BIOS to boot my computer from. (previously, he was even able to run it from the school computers, but the techhies have disabled it already.) Of course, to those tech geeks out there, that is probably nothing, but nonetheless I was still wowed. Now, my computer startup time has been cut from 5 mins to a mere 10 secs, I can run multiple programs without lagging, and best of all, I can enjoy a lag-free game of SCO. =D Finally, a few conclusions drawn from today: 1) Never get repairmen to do fix your computer. Some charge a staggering $100 an hour for their service, and whatever they install on your computer, you can expect them to overcharge for it. Instead, just readup on the web and try to do it yourself, else if you're still not confident enough or are just too lazy, give some tech-savvy friend a call. He should gladly help you out for free, if not for just a nominal token sum. Saves you lots of money, which you can spend on even more gadgets and stuff. 2) Never trust onlines guides for accurate prices. Yep, that also includes Hardware Zone's price guides, even though HWZ is probably the most reputable online community for all things tech. The prices they stated for my RAM stick was $80 and up, but I visited all the stores listed and their prices were above $90. The store which sold me the $88 RAM stick was not listed there, I stumbled onto it by accident. Which shows that those onlien guide would be good to give you an estimated price range, but you're better off checking it outyourself. 3) Do your homework. This especially applies to tech newbs like me, who thought you could just slot in any random RAM stick into your CPU and it would work, before i actually went to research online about the different types of RAM. 4) Avoid buying from superstores. Even if they have mebership schemes and all that, they still rip your money off with much higher prices, presumably for higher rental and all that. I called Challenger and they quoted me a price of over $200 for the RAM stick i was looking for. Maybe it was of a higher quality and all that, but i could get one at almost one-third of the price at those smaller stores in Sim Lim Square. After bearing with long load and lag times with only 256MB of RAM for more than a year already, having 768MB of RAM is certainly a fresh new zippy experience. But then again, in just a few years time, greater memory demands of new technology might render current specifications obsolete. But for now, i'm lovin' it. |
'Twas teh winnar at 11:17 pm.
