turgid's Journal: The Price of RAM

Call me crazy but I buy my RAM from www.crucial.com/uk because every time I've ever bought RAM from anywhere else it has been defective. Honestly. gcc and memtest86 say so.

I'm sure that nowadays there's healthy market for RAM, and I'd be interested to hear of other sources.

I've been meaning to upgrade from 1GB DDR2/667 ECC to 4GB DDR2/800 ECC and a couple of days ago it was £43.something including VAT. Now it's £50. Grrrr....

I'm not one of these crazy overclocking loonies. My time and money are too valuable to have an extremely fast but flaky system. I'd rather pay 10% more and get quality and not have to reboot every 10 minutes if you know what I mean.

My last record up time was 64 days. That's in a domestic setting with no UPS and running Slamd64.

The limiting factor seems to be how long the electricity company can keep the power going.

Talking of which, today on Radio 4 news, it was announced that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (formerly BNFL, for whom I worked), has announced that there are four sites worthy of new nuclear power stations, including Bradwell (mine).

I frobbed (in octal) with the Honeywell 316 there, and did the k-curves for the PDP-11s :-)

Me too

[Tet]

I bought my replacement RAM from Crucial last week. It was 50 quid +VAT for 2GB, which seemed a bit pricey, but then it was DDR400, which I guess is obsolete now. RAM is one of those things where you really don't want to be going for the cheapest option. My time is worth more than that, and buying quality RAM is money well spent. That said, I suspect we're victims of the pound being so weak at the moment (not only against the dollar, but also the yen and other oriental currencies)

Re:

[turgid]

I've decided to go for a CUDA graphics card. Something modest like a 9400. Hopefully the power consumption won't be too dreadful. They say it's about 50W TDP. At the moment, I have the absolute bottom of the range PCIe card I could find at the time (limited budget etc.) which is a 7100GS.