Memory upgrade

Five and a half years ago, I wrote about purchasing a mobile computer; I'm surprised that it's so long ago (in computer terms). Since I started working at home, I've been using this computer as opposed to the mobile that I have from work, as mine has a bigger screen. I keep the other mobile ready in case I have problems; at one stage I used to keep one computer connected to work and use the other for Teams conversations.

I've noticed in the past few days that it's becoming more and more difficult to work with my home computer: it's slow in switching from one program to another. I use Remote Desktop Manager and Teams and Whatsapp and Chrome ... and there isn't enough memory for all of them. So Windows swaps out memory to disk, and it transpires that the disk is considered slow (at least, when compared to SSD). So these memory swaps make the computer seem even slower.

I got fed up with this. The original configuration had 6 GB memory installed - I went to my local computer hardware man and asked him to enlarge the memory as much as possible. The computer has 4 GB on board and another slot in which the extra 2 GB was installed, so the maximum that he could add was 2 GB (replacing the 2 GB memory chip with a 4 GB chip). So now the computer has 8 GB.

And it flies! Today was a real pleasure working with the computer. It seems that I was using the maximum possible, and a small increase in memory size brought a huge improvement in performance. A worthwhile enhancement. 

8 GB memory! I remember enlarging the memory of my first clone computer from 512 KB to 640 KB and feeling pleased. According to my calculations, 8 GB is more than 16,000 times larger that the memory in that first computer.