Dragging My Computer Into The 21st Century

I'm not a tinkerer. Although I use computers every day while working in the software mine, I'm not the guy who is constantly tinkering with the clock speed on the CPU or swapping out the video card every time PC Magazine writes a glowing review. My current computer is over five years old.

After my recent bout with Facebook-related viruses I beefed up the firewall and virus protection software on my machine. This led to a pronounced slowdown in performance. I finally got sick of it and decided to update the RAM. It was only then that I noticed how much RAM my computer was rocking. 256MB. Yep. I doubled checked to make sure the front of the tower didn't say Commodore. How pathethic is that?

Like I said, I'm not one to tinker. The machine worked fine for a long time. Performance wasn't an issue. But still. 256MB? I was surprised the thing would even boot. At this point in history, 256MB of RAM is like driving around in a horse-drawn carriage or mowing your grass with a yoked goat. It's like washing your clothes with a rock. It's like using a hammer and chisel to look inside the brain instead of ordering an MRI.

I'm proud to say my computer is now humming along nicely with the maximum allowable RAM for its model: two 1GB DDR RAM cards. Which are already obsolete, since DDR2 (the current standard) is soon to be replaced by DDR3. But hey, at least my copy of Lotus 123 runs like a champ.