Saturday, July 29, 2006

Oh What a Difference a Gig Makes!

Binky the Q1 survived his surgery today and is now running a gig of RAM. In some simple tests before I started rebuilding, the unit was dramatically zippier. Thanks again to Kevin Tofel for his post on upgrading Sammy's ram.

I have a few small things to add. I had one screw that was VERY tight and they are VERY small. You have to be careful not to strip them or lose them. I dropped one on tile and my dog tried to eat it. He's jealous of the Q1 too.

Kevin mentioned that there are some clips holding the unit on. I didn't find any simple release for them. My unit opened easily on the side with the hold button and I carefully lifted it from right to left like a hinge. I was expecting to open it top to bottom. DON'T RUSH THIS STEP. It will take longer to open the case than to insert the ram.

When you stick the ram in, make sure you (gently) insert it all the way. When you push the ram down, there are two round notches that the silver clips should mate up with. If they don't go to together, gently do it again.

I did notice that the strap connector is tightly attached to the internal frame. Always a good sign. And the HD is a Hitachi. At work we only use IBM, now Hitachi (Hitachi took over IBM's drive biz) drives on the roughly 3,800 buses and trains our system is now installed in. The engineers prefer their reliability and the accountant in me likes the 3 year warranty we get.

AVS did not work after installing the RAM. It would start to load and lock. Since I'm restoring anyway, I didn't mess with it, but I did have an external, wireless keyboard attached when trying.

The Gyration wireless keyboard and the Mad Dog DVD player (not easily portable, it's family Bible size) both worked flawlessly with the bios and through the install.


My case opened Right to Left. From Hold Key side to Power Plug side.
















Sorry guys, my other shots came out blurry. Not enough coffee I guess. That or Binky is shy. Perhaps I should have put on my glasses when doing this. You'll just have to rely on Kevin's great photos. Nothing to see here. Move along. I'll post on the software reinstall when I'm done. So, like 3 weeks from now. At least, that's what it seems like!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Something about adding RAM breaks AVS. Frankly, I don't use AVS much. In my case, I managed to somehow totally trash the sound drivers. Reinstalling the drivers kept causing a lockup requiring a hard reboot. After a week of wrestling with that, I gave up and decided to rebuild the machine. Since I was rebuiding, why not add RAM too!

The rebuild decision was first. RAM was second. But adding RAM definitely breaks AVS. Weird huh?