ah the memories.

well i finally did it. I broke down and bought some new memory.

In my inaugural post i offered some suggestions that i was thinking about, but as it turns out none of these would be used.

My brother got me an amazon gift certificate for my birthday, so of i go a hunting :)

while surfing around i found the perfect solution: 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 800MHz Corsair memory. after debating for many days i finally decided to bite the bullet and just buy the damn stuff.



i should have ordered sooner since the memory as gone up nearly $4 since i first looked at it. :-(



I had a free trial of Amazon's Amazon Prime shipping (free 2day shipping from Amazon, $3.99 for 1 day) i decided to 2 day it so i can start the craziness early :-) (side note, while this is a cool offering unless you ship A LOT of stuff i think it would be cheaper to pay shipping then the $79 yearly fee)

The day of the delivery finally arrives. I am waiting for my UPS package to show up. Now i don't know if the drivers are trained by mice or they just don't like people but the only reason i know my package arrived was i happened to be:

1) expecting a package

-and -

2) happened to be walking past when there was a tiny almost inaudible knock at the door.

I pull open the door to see a little man dressed in brown wave and tell me my package was by the door.







oh well.







Now i have my item of power and am happy :-)







I look at the box does not appear to be any damage. so far so good. since i know what i am getting i don't really worry about the this side up label and slice the tape on the bottom of the package.







to my horror i see the nice little clam shell packaging sitting pressed up against the side of the box right under (well over i guess since i opened it upside down) about 6 inches of air packaging material. no my question at this point is: why bother? might as well pack it in an envelope since it really wasn't protected against being dropped.

before i bring down my computer i show my lovely wife my new acquisition and you can hear her eyes glaze over as she says "that's nice."





Before i install the memory i had left my system unplugged so i could see the difference in boot times once i installed the new memory. 8 minutes and 3 seconds with 512MB of Hynix 533MHz DDR2 memory. -blech-





after shutting down again, I pulled the side off my Coolermaster Mystique case and yanked the old memory out.





after carefully positioning these armored little guys i replugged every thing in. long beep every 2 seconds



.....??? crap!



Power off.



looking around every thing looks OK, make sure everything is seated correctly, yes. OK let's reset the bios see if that helps.



switch jumper wait requisite 5 seconds switch back.



plug back in, power up.



full screen Biostar logo. step in the right direction.



mash the delete key so i can edit the bios to how i like it.



turning off the stupid full screen logo, remove the floppy controller, remove the network controller, configure the auto-on timer, set high performance settings. reboot.



3072000KB ...???



da hell?



shut down and remove 1 stick

2097152KB well that's right

being lazy at this point i decide to let it run with 1 stick see how long it takes to boot now.

P.O.S.T complete

SCSI BIOS initialized

Vista load screen,

P.O.S.T??

what now? this should at least go through a complete boot before it craps out on me.

email to Biostar.



Explained what happened and they advised to remove the SCSI card and try booting from the on-board port.


well i am using the SCSI as a directory controller and not a boot device so why not remove it for testing purposes?





boot with no SCSI (faster by the way) get a prompt to go to safe mode last known good or boot normal prompt.





i decide to boot normal. excellent get to the desktop.





damn i like my SCSI drive there.





blue screen.

Wow. didn't see that coming.

hey, look disable anti virus and try again.

reboot in safe mode.

wow, huge icons, cool!

now i have to find my Anti-virus software.

control panel,

add-remove programs.

AVG.

remove.

At this time i also remove the control program for my TV tuner as i am not using it right now and hopefully windows media center will work right without it.

reboot.

Look Vista Splash screen. hey a desktop.

and it's still running. extra cool.

install my wife's new favorite anti-virus: Avira.

well now let's see if we have any further problems.

hmmm. well windows seems to be running a whole hell of a lot faster. Yippie!

now i have a spare stick of memory which at this point may or may not be any good. so i stick it in the case and pull the other stick. boot up 2097152KB. ok so both sticks are good. might as well plug both in.

shut down, insert memory. restart.

3072000KB -sigh-

well i might as well live with it since i paid for the memory. reboot and check my boot speed.

5 minutes to a full load including SCSI bios load and all of the vista desktop goodies.(sidebar, anti virus, Gomez, B.O.I.N.C, etc.)

w00t!

and also my system will reboot after a complete shutdown. bonus.