by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 2 February 2011
WEAVERVILLE, NC — I recenty acquired a new desktop PC. It’s a Dell Dimension E310. It’s a fantastic desktop tower but it was lacking in one major area. It came with the minimum amount of memory to support the operating system that was shipped with it–MS Windows XP Media Center. Of course, this OS was the first thing to go.
The Dell Dimension E310 is a dual-core, Pentium 4, 533 Mhz processor with math co-processors, 64-bit PC with a160GB ATA hard drive, but only 512MB of random-access memory. Even though I’m running the Ubuntu Linux 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) 64-bit operating system whose minimum system requirements is 256MB of physical RAM, the PC starts to slow down appreciably after loading OOo3.2 and the Mendeley Research Desktop beta 0.982 applications. Both of these applications are system resource hogs. As physical RAM begins to be used up, the OS begins to dump unused RAM into the 1.4GB swap file on the HD and the number of HD read/write operations take a toll on performance. Since read/write access to physical RAM is somewhere in the 4 nsec range as opposed to 400 msec for the HD, the speed of data retrieval and storage slows down considerably. So, a memory upgrade was in order.
The memory that came with the Dell Dimension E310 was 533 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM, non-ECC, 240-pin DIMM memory from Dell. The system will take either 400 or 533 Mhz memory and has a capacity of 2GB of physical RAM. Even though the system board does not require the memory to be installed in pairs, if both memory bays are not used, a system-wide performance degradation is likely to occur.
I went searching for memory and found the solution. Amazon.com, my favorite eCommerce website, had just the memory I was looking for. So, I purchased 2GB of Kingston DDR2 SDRAM, non-ECC, 240-pin DIMM memory in two sticks of 1GB each for the low price of $19.49 each. My wife has an account with Amazon.com that has free 2-day shipping. I purchased the memory on the 29th of January and it shipped the same day, tax-free, and no shipping. I can’t believe that I was able to get 2GB of Kingston memory for $38.98. That’s an incredible buy. The shipment should arrive on 1 February 2011.
I can’t wait to get the new memory upgrade into the Dell. It should transform that already-powerful desktop PC into a new machine. The Ubuntu 10.10 Linux operating system should be quite comfortable with the memory upgrade. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to load OOo3.2 and Mendeley Research Desktop beta without even having to touch the hard drive swap file. That should make for an incredible experience.
Recent Comments