As we tidied up yesterday, I had an attempt at stripping parts from a PC that was no longer required. In fact, it had been in service for over 7 years, and was now approaching the EOL.

I stripped out the CD rom, which was seldom used, the hard-disk to get at the contents, and had a look at the rest. It was a reminder of lessons not learned. The IBM PC was a 500MHZ Celeron with 64 MB of Ram. Unfortunately, it just ran like a treacle river… SLOWLY.

This was a mistake of mine: running Chinese Windows has always been a drag on memory – Windows 98 ran fine in 64MB but the Chinese version needed at least 128MB to run reasonably; but then I repeated the same mistake when I bought an IBM notebook 1.5GHz mobile pentium with 256MB which I thought would be MORE than enough, but Windows XP in Chinese needs MORE…

Finally, I learned this lesson: if you are buying a computer, whether it is an IBM, ACER, ASUS, or even a DELL, always buy more dell memory memory than is suggested or even recommended. It helps to future proof your system to some extent, it’s typically easy to buy the type you want when you buy the notebook, and it will make life a lot easier as you run multiple applications on your system!

Lesson Learned. Trust me!