Re: Dell Laptops

On 8/10/07, Tom Jedrzejewicz <tomjedrz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A couple of years ago we had all kinds of trouble with a laptop --
blue screens, unexplained slowness, etc. Finally the tech noticed
that the system had 1GB of RAM when our records showed 512MB. The
user, who knew enough to be dangerous, sheepishly told us that he had
bought an upgrade at Fry's, expensed it, and installed it himself. We
took out the upgrade, and the problems disappeared.

The phantom problems always seem to fall on the RAM, which is one of the
biggest reasons why I hem and haw when deciding whether to upgrade memory.
I'm too cheap to pay the excessive premium imposed by the computer
manufacturers. I have always avoided the fire sale prices on brands I've
never heard of, and always only choose brand names that I'm familiar with
and know that they've been out there for awhile. Beyond that, it's a
crapshoot. I remember having issues with an old Gateway running Win98SE
that had almost none of its original parts in it except for the mobo; the
essence was that there was no suitable diagnostics to test your memory since
Windows (98SE, maybe others?) had its own special timing on the RAM that
could not be otherwise duplicated by diagnostics software, or so claimed the
Microsoft KB as I recall.

Hopefully, some day, these phantom issues will be a thing of the past.

- Dan