My computer got a lot faster!

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

Back when I bought this Dell I only had 256meg of memory installed. Once I got over the cost of the computer I intended on upgrading the memory to 512meg.

Well, as we preachers say, "the days turned into weeks and the weeks into years" and I never got around to upgrading it.

Today I decided to use some residual Christmas cash to double the memory.

I went down to Frys and found that for $30 I could get another 256meg stick of memory - but for $56 I could make that 512megs. I went for the 512megs. I also got faster memory -- 400MHz -- it won't do me any good right now because the original memory stick is at 266MHz, but I wanted to be able to take the 512meg stick out someday and put it in some future computer.

Anyway, I just fired my desktop up with a jump from 256meg of memory to 768megs. And, yes, I can tell the difference!

[Bob Wright]

Upgrading ram to 512 is the best improvement a person can do. Anything over that is not cost effective for most users. There are people who need more ram than that for special purposes, but they pay dearly for it. I think you did a good thing.

[Gina Stevenson]

Upgrading ram to 512 is the best improvement a person can do. Anything over that is not cost effective for most users. There are people who need more ram than that for special purposes, but they pay dearly for it. I think you did a good thing.

It may be great if one doesn't have dial-up. Things don't move faster here, I've found, with 512 than 64; what did change was how many things I could have open at once ... so since Firefox has separate tabs rather than whole new windows, I can open several posts in several tabs, and then read them one by one, so some are still loading while I'm reading others.

But as for actual speed with which something pops up, nope. ;) WHAT I CANNOT FIGURE OUT is why, with this 56k modem, when it tells me I've hooked up at something like 38.x, the home page loads normally, but sometimes when it tells me 40, or on rare occasion 41-42, it then keeps telling me there was a "problem loading page." You'd think faster would be better ... WEIRD! Any ideas of why the faster modem hook-up equals more loading problems than when it attaches to the web at a lower speed??

Thanks!