Heidi and I just returned from dinner with her family and I’m feeling rather content. After dinner we gave Heidi’s old laptop to her niece and nephew, and they were very appreciative. I also showed my RockVomit prototype to Heidi’s brother, and his immense glee was very rewarding.
I’d spent a while setting up the laptop; I reinstalled Windows (after toying with Linux) so that Heidi’s sister and her husband could administer it, created accounts with limited access, and set their default homepages to ABC Kids. We even installed some additional RAM (I’ll talk about this more towards the end).
It was all time well spent though as they were absolutely estatic. I think that the stand-out comment was:
It’s absolutely lovely!
I thought that was a very grown-up expression for a 5-year-old girl! Aside from just being happy, it was good to see Heidi’s 7-year-old nephew so engaged and focused as we worked through the initial wireless network problems and configured the internet connection.
Anyhow, onto the RAM upgrade. I’ve always been fairly wary of RAM upgrades for notebook computers (they always seem inordinately expensive due to compatability issues) and also about buying things from China via ebay.
Since the machine only had 128MB of RAM, I knew that an additional 256MB would drammatically improve performance. It would be very expensive (over $AU80 to get the RAM locally) so I figured why not give China via ebay a shot (with prices of less than AU$20).
Postage was free, the RAM arrived within a week, it worked perfectly, and there was a nice note in the envelope:
I was initially confused by the “Warm Tips” title until Heidi mentioned that they must be like “Hot Tips” but less effusive. I can highly recommend memory_superman and their super ebay store.