I’ve been looking for memory for my Mum’s PC.
My Mum has a PC. A generic PC. Nothing fancy. I bought it from Central Computer Supplies in Birmingham through an advert in Micro Mart. Not literally through the advert, like some kind of mysterious communications portal in the middle of a computer magazine. That would be ludicrous! I telephoned them; of course I did!
I made some notes of her PC spec before I gave her it:
Mum’s PC
AMD Duron 1.1 GHz
SiS 730 motherboard
128 MB RAM
19.1 GB HDD
56k Fax Modem
54x CD-ROM
It’s running dreadfully slowly and is in dire need of a reformat and reinstallation of Windows, and I also thought a memory boost wouldn’t go amiss either. It has Windows 98 Second Edition installed which — as you will all know — gradually develops a kind of OS arthritis … it slows seizes up.
I read in a review that the SiS 730 chipset only supports PC133 SDRAM. But how many pins? 144? 168?
I thought I’d just tell Mum what it needs and let her go into PC World:
Assistant: Hello madam, can I help?
Mum: Can I have half a pound of some Crucial Ballistix DDR 400 RAM with 12 gigaflops of graphic conflagrations and a megawhop of anti-telharsic memory routers.
Assistant: … erm. That doesn’t sound like anything that we …
Mum: I guess it will be 168-pin.
Assistant: … ah, right! 168-pin memory, we have that.
Mum: Will it be easy to hoover?
Assistant: …sorry?!
Mum: Also, could you just confirm for me that it’ll be compatible with my water cooling system? It’s to go in my new gaming rig and I don’t want any problems with the ATX factor or my spandau ballet©.
Assistant: … erm? I think I’ll get the manager.
And you thought of that, did you? ;o)
Yes. All by myself. With a little help from my imaginary friend James Frost. Maybe.