Vocal Voices

Since I've been back in Scotland, I've been giving my Bil some help to upgrade his computers.

First off was the laptop. All the documentation and sites said that it would only support 2gb ddr2 dims. I suggested that he bought 1x 4gb DDR2 dim and see if it worked.

Which it did. I then spent about a week trying to get his hard drive cloned to a SSD. He now has a reasonably fast, old, cheap, laptop.

I did some defragging of his desktop machine. When he asked me to look at it, I tried to get up the task manager and after 30 minutes of watching the hard drive light look like a power light, with no response at all, I powered it off. We defragged his drive about 6 times with offline and online then checked the machine again.

This machine was even worse. 64 bit operating system with 3GB of RAM installed. Again, all the documentation said that the machine would not support more than 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

As I was upgrading my own machines with 8gb Dimms, I brought over 2x4gb and 2x8gb of mine to test when I was returning the laptop.

powered it off, laid it on it's side, took all the RAM out and put in the 8GB dimms. No surprise when it just beeped at me, it's a HP and they do funny stuff with their systems. So out with the 8gb dims and in with the 4gb dimms.

Beeping noises.

Hmmm. Thinking cap on. I switched back to the original RAM, agonised over the slooooooow start up and then searched for a bios update for the motherboard. Aymayzing, there was one. Then again the machine is about 4 years old and has never been maintained so perhaps it's not that surprising.

Download the HP windows BIOS package, run it and...... After a few screens flashing past telling me it was extracting files, the square root of bugger all happened. Tried again and the same, tried to find the files it unpacked, nothing.

Downloaded and used the Universalextractor and extracted the bios package and the flash tools. Ran the updater and it threw an error then promptly flashed the bios with dire warnings not to switch it off. All the way to 98% where it hung..... and hung... and hung...

After about 30 minutes of waiting (and searching to see if I could get another motherboard if things went tits), I took my anti-squeamish pills and cancelled the flash the rebooted the machine. Straight into the bios mode which told me it had been updated.

Power down, put in One 4gb dim and it powered up. Put the other one in and it powered up and I let it boot to Windows.

I then powered it down again and switched the 8gb Dimms. Beeping.

Oh well you win some you lose some. At least we know the parameters. The machine has gone from non viable to fairly swift when booted up and running. I even had two users logged in at the same time and switched between them a few times.

Bil will get a SSD for the desktop some time in the next month or so and I'll clone that for him too.

This should be easy like the laptop was. But.. Sometimes it's just a bit more difficult than you think it should be.

Ah happy memories.

Hundreds of floppies. All the dire warnings about flashing the BIOS even though the update was from the manufacturer and specific to the motherboard. Using different sizes of memory and swapping them about in the slots. Video cards, sound cards and hard drives, and all of them from the boxes under the desk.

Whenever family and friends were getting new computers I would take their old ones and swap things about to make "new" ones, some of which were a better spec than the real new ones. Happy days.

Yep, I don't do a lot of that nowadays because most people tend to run processors as fast or even faster than I run and a lot of graphics are on board. I've never really bought fast graphics except my Laptop (fast enough to run even the latest games even now, 4.5 years later).

However RAM is such a critical factor and manufacturers were, 4-5 years ago, putting in such small amounts and putting 64 bit operating systems on them for "future proofing" they never intended to deliver, that there are loads of computers out there now that, with a simple injection of RAM, can get a new lease of life.

As for SSD's the capability is such a departure from the norm of even 3 years ago (10 times as fast for large files and 50 times as fast for small), that one simple change can return a completely different machine and two, with RAM, can return a machine some 4 to 5 times faster than the original that was bought.

I don't think I have ever seen a time when older hardware can be given a new lease of life by so few components for so little money with such a large performance jump.