It’s been another gray week here and my notable accomplishment was buying yet another memory upgrade yet again. As some readers may recall, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to upgrade the memory in my computer and max it out to 2 gigabytes (GB).
Sadly, like so many things computer-related, the upgrade did not go well. I even followed my own advice and called the manufacturer. I gave them my credit card number and a few days later a box of chips arrived. I installed them without a hitch, until I realized that my computer only had 1GB installed, not two. I thought maybe the computer had a problem accessing the second 1GB. It took a while to realize that the computer was fine, but I hadn’t looked at the box very closely. Instead of receiving two 1GB chips, I got two 512K chips. My computer was dutifully using all the memory it could. The problem was that I was sent the wrong item.
So I called the manufacturer again and got an RMA number for my erroneous chips. I happily used the 1GB chips until the new stuff arrived. (It made a BIG difference…I’ll admit it, I was spoiled by that memory upgrade, even if it was temporary.)
My new chips arrived, and this time I looked at the boxes. They said 1GB. (Yay!) So I took out the 512 chips and put in the 1GBs. The computer beeped and squawked and wouldn’t turn on. So I called technical support. Various suggestions were made, some of which were scary like upgrading the BIOS. Since it was a Saturday, they suggested I call back during the week. In the meantime, I put the 512s back in, which again worked fine.
That Monday, I called tech support again and it turned out that the manufacturer sent the wrong chips YET AGAIN. As it turns out, there are two types of memory: error correcting and non-error correcting (non-ECC). I was shipped error-correcting RAM, which wouldn’t work in my machine. So I got *another* RMA number and found out from technical support the exact part number that I need.
I returned all the memory failures and was back with the very slow computer I started with. I ordered my fabulous non-ECC RAM and it arrived today. I installed it and everything worked on the first try. No beeps and squawks. The process took all of about 5 minutes.
Anyway, this long story points to the fact that no matter how much experience and/or information you have about computers, "stuff" still happens. So don’t feel bad when it happens to you 😉