on upgrading laptop memory

Just a few notes on my recent experience of upgrading the RAM memory on my mac laptop. 

My laptop is getting towards three years old now, and it has started to freeze from time to time. I am not the ideal laptop user, I tend to run with the hard drive almost completely full and tend to run far too many open programmes at the same time. However on checking with the Crucial website, it was apparent that I could upgrade the RAM memory in my laptop for around fifty pounds. My Applecare Warranty was near to expiry anyway so I reckoned that I did not have a huge amount to lose, so I gave it a go. 

By way of full disclosure, I completed an SHNC in Computing many years ago, so I have experience of opening up desktop computers and rearranging components. I have also installed memory in a few of my other computers before, so I am not a novice. 

Should I upgrade the RAM memory ?

Only if you are confident, your machine is sluggish or old and it is not the end of the world if you break it.

What is the RAM memory ?

RAM is the working memory that your computer uses to run open applications, rather than to store your old documents. My first laptop in the eighties had four megabytes of RAM and eighty megabytes of hard drive. My current laptop had four gigabytes of RAM and two hundred and fifty gigabytes of hard drive. 

How do I get more RAM memory ?

Other suppliers are available, but I would recommend Crucial, they provide an app that you can download and run to provide a quote for suitable compatible memory. You may need to go into System Preferences to ensure you can run the app after download if you have set your Systems Preferences to restrict the apps that you can download and run. Go to the Apple Menu, Systems Preferences, Security and Privacy, General tab, and amend to allow you to download apps from anywhere. You should then be able to open up the app and run it. If you like the price, just order online from there. The upside of Crucial is that they are cheap, reliable and well regarded. The downside, they do not install. If you went to Apple for a RAM memory upgrade it would be a lot more expensive. I am not aware of any problems with Crucial memory.

When to do it ?

There are risks, so best to only upgrade memory when you need to, your machine is sluggish, or when you have little to lose. If you are out of warranty then it is worthwhile to extend the useful life of your machine. Having said that, RAM memory is not the ‘be all and end all’ of performance that it used to be, for many users it is pretty irrelevant.

Can I do it ?

If you have some training in IT hardware then you should be okay, there are instructions on line, so if you are willing to be careful, then it is straightforward. It is fiddly and you do need to be methodical, so if this is not you, then give it a miss.

What else could I do ?

Nowadays I would not bother defragmenting my hard drive, but if performance is getting poor, then remove unwanted applications, reduce the amount of stuff on your hard drive, reduce the stuff on your desktop, remove any unwanted applications that run at login, just generally give your machine a springclean. Remember that there are plenty of ways to store material in the cloud and reduce the work that your computer is doing.

What could possibly go wrong ?

You could easily break your computer and invalidate your warranty. Apple might turn a blind eye to successfully installed non-Apple memory, but if you break the slot for the chips then you have a very expensive paperweight.

What could possibly go right ?

You could end up with a machine that runs quicker, and stick a good few extra years of life onto your computer. Having said that, more RAM does not make the screen any bigger or expand your hard drive.

So talk me through it -

1 getting fed up with my laptop freezing

2 went onto Crucial website, downloaded their app, amended Systems Preferences to run it 

3 checked the expiry date for my Applecare

4 ordered online additional RAM from Crucial, along with an anti static wrist strap

5 reset Systems Preferences to only download and run Apps from the App Store and identified developers.

6 waited patiently for the delivery

7 chose a quiet afternoon

8 cleared the table

9 spread out a towel on the table, 

10 printed off the instructions on the Apple website 

11 switched off the laptop and let it cool for ten minutes

11 touched the kitchen taps to earth myself

12 put on wrist strap and taped it to the computer 

13 the laptop was face down on the towel, unscrewed the screws on the back, they are mostly minute, those around the battery were longer. I have freckles that are larger than the small screws. They are absolutely tiny! They seem to be screwed in at a slight angle, so it is tricky returning the back of your laptop to the smooth feel of well aligned screw heads that it had before. 

14 unclipped the RAM memory, eek, the two chips are on top of each other!

15 removed both chips and put them onto the open box with the new chips

16 pushed the first chip into the bottom slot, making sure to line up the side notches and notch in the gold connector at the front

17 pushed in the second chip above it, lining it up too

18 fired up laptop 

19 checked for installed memory under the Apple About this Mac options, showing only four Gigabytes, should be eight, More Info told me that only one four Gig chip was installed, so shut down,

20 left to cool for ten minutes

21 went through the whole process again, giving the chips an even firmer shove in

22 booted up, and all now running

23 breathed considerable sigh of relief. 

Obviously whenever the back is off your computer do not eat, smoke, cough, drink, etc. Do not touch anything you don’t need to. Shoving the RAM in does require a fair bit of force. I preferred when there were two slots beside each other, that way you could take out one chip, and put in the replacement to the same depth as the remaining one. The slots on top of each other are a lot more fiddly and demanding. 

Overall, I would do this again, but I am not rushing to do it, and I would have reservations about doing it for someone else, just in case I broke their machine. 

Rambling, scrivener, stuff and pensions

After a few days of good weather, the weekend has arrived, along with the rain. Accordingly pottering indoors. At work doing lawyer’s hours trying to finish off a major project before taking any decent leave.

I recently bought Scrivener, basically it is a word processor, but it also has a lot of the document management functionality of products like DevonThink or even Voodoopad. I am fond of these meta word processors that allow you to manipulate and organise text. 

The particular angle for Scrivener is that it is designed for writers, mainly fiction writers, but it also has plenty to offer other writers, though they might find other products that are more specifically tailored to their needs. I downloaded the trial, and although the learning curve is pretty steep, it was immediately apparent that if I could master the App then it had a lot a contribute. Although there is a thirty day working trial, I just bought it, and started importing all my various writings into it. 

If you are serious about writing, then Scrivener is as serious as you are, and has plenty to offer. Currently I have got a file for the evolving set of short stories that is Losing Definition, one for my old novel The Garbageman, and importing all my blog postings into another file. There is still a novel lurking in a bundle of reporter’s notebooks that I will have to type out. Not sure whether it is any good, but probably worth typing out just to see what I was writing twenty years ago. 

Now for some other random jottings, intriguing to see the growing coverage of hoarders being rescued from homes choked with stuff that is usually pretty much worthless. I wonder what it actually says about us, the impulse to compulsive hoarding and clutter is common to us all, are we adrift in a sea of information and strangeness and is keeping familiar items close by a means to try and keep the strangeness at bay? 

At the other extreme, for many people material possessions are now being stripped of any sentiment and meaning at all. We do not bother with the dusty shoebox full of photos, the music and dvds are all digital nowadays. The younger generation seem to travel pretty light, they are attached to their technology, but no one would keep an obsolete phone out of sentimental value. There are a few collectors of antique computers and the like, check out the System Folder Blog

http://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/classic-ailments/

I am even considering putting in a bid for an old Braun Calculator. 

But this is just a generalised nostalgia for old technology and design, as with my fondness for old Letterpress items and the like. They have no personal history for me, I just like the look of them. 

I am not sure that people cherish their IKEA furniture and impart it with great sentimental value. I suppose that there are a few things that I have that remind me of my parents, or relatives, that are of sentimental value to me, but I am not sure how much, if any, of this would transfer down to my children. There are a couple of wind up clocks, I suspect that that will be one for each daughter, but I don’t imagine them filling their house with our old IKEA furniture, Habitat lamps, eighties CDs and redundant videos. 

The only people I can think of where there is an intergenerational transfer of material is where father and son are in the same trade, or where it is all attached to a house, some stately pile somewhere. 

Otherwise it is all going digital and disposable. With the safety belt that if you miss something from your childhood, or that you wish your father had given you, you can just fire up eBay and order that pocket watch or set of old fishing rods. 

Rambling on, there does seem to be a constant nip nip nip at pensions these days. After the debacle of all those endowment policies that turned out to be hopelessly incapable of paying off mortgages, are pensions likewise heading towards being a huge mis-selling scandal or at least a colossal waste of money. There is only so much that you can postpone retirement age before people quite rightly start to think that by the time I am ready to collect I will most likely have died, or be so doddery that frankly it would be pointless stinting today just so that my savings can pay for my care home, when the government is hardly likely to have me put down anyway. 

The image for this week is an old ‘footlight’ that I bought on eBay because it is a really funky shape. 

I love modernist architecture

I love modernist architecture, I love modernist writing, at heart I am probably more of a modernist than anything else. Post modernism and semiotics left me cold. 

But why does no one live in a modernist house, and why doesn't anyone much want to. The bulk of architecture books, blogs and magazines focus on houses and buildings that are very much in the modernist vein, more curvy perhaps, more layered, but far more akin to Le Corbusier than to Georgian or vernacular. 

The modernist aesthetic of people like Le Corbusier has formed the baseline for popular taste, we might osciallate round it, but we never venture terribly far. The designs of Dieter Rams, or Apple, they are modernists. There is other stuff about, steampunk, Kai Krause, even Archigram and Future Designs, but we never seem to be able to escape the sleek modernist lines of the early twentieth century design. We don't all wear their glasses, or early twentieth century clothes, or read their books, or listen to their music, but we will aspire to live in their sleek glass walled houses.

Look at the photos of Julius Shulman and you see the perfect modernist dream, the sun is shining, the perspectives are crisp, receding into the stunning horizon, attractive young people drape over angular furniture. There is something ageless about his photographs because the best of them are perfect abstract compositions. They are picture perfect, and we want to be part of that perfect picture. 

But deep down, we know that the sun seldom shines, our perspectives recede into a horizon of blocky housing estates and electricity pylons, we don't want to drape ourselves over uncomfortable angular furniture. Instead we want to be in warm rooms slouched on leather sofas, surrounded by screens and clutter.

We are hard wired to want space that is cozy and defensible, just like the hamster or the caveman. And the great modernist panes of glass feel neither cozy nor defensible. They were not practical to build either, our traditional vernacular architecture was largely a set of tricks and techniques to cover up lines that were not straight and edges that did not meet. Old style pitched roofs kept off the rain, ugly ventilation kept back the damp. 

Modernist architecture can make for fabulous photos, but in our hearts we do not want to live in glass walled rooms. Perhaps we need to find a more functional idea of beauty.