Twenty quid well spent

It has been a truism ever since computers stopped being slide rules: buy as much memory as you can afford. I knew that when I bought a 32KB expansion kit for my ZX81 from Audio Computers of Southend (which never actually worked), and I've known it ever since.

So why has it taken me this long to bother to upgrade my main computer at home? It's not a bad computer - a Samsung X60 laptop, with a worn keyboard, a knackered battery, a power socket that's so loose I've had to superglue the lead in place, and USB sockets in all the wrong places. With the 1GB of memory it was born with, it runs Ubuntu more than well.

But that's not enough for virtual machinery, and as I've stopped using my behemoth of a homebrew Windows machine I've come to rely on XP under Virtualbox on the Samsung for all those annoying corporate tasks that don't like Firefox. That works slowly and painfully. And since there's a lot more OS wrangling to be done these days (Win 7, various Linuxes, even my own experimental distro I've built while playing with SUSE Studio), there's more and more reason to make the virtualisation work well. Waiting five minutes while you watch the disk access light beacon and your mouse turn into a sloth in concrete is less and less amusing.

So I finally - and why so long? - splashed out twenty quid for two more gig. That only brings me up to 2.5 GB, as the 1GB was in two chunks of 512K each, but that's more than enough to run two VMs at once with nothing running out of puff but the CPU, and everything else is swift as you like. It's a new machine.

You know this, because you're more sensible than me and have long since maxed out your computer's RAM. But just in case you'd temporarily forgotten - go and do it.

I should mention here that I bought the memory from Crucial. I would say how good their automatic system scanner is, because it is, but it doesn't run under Linux. It does run under XP in Virtualbox, and has good enough grace to pronounce itself entirely baffled if you try.

But it takes seconds on the website to find your system manually, it doesn't try to oversell you, and the chips arrive as quickly as you'd like. And I feel that I should mention this because in the past they've been jolly good about sending chips gratis for various ZDNet projects, so it's a right pleasure to report on a good experience as yer ordinary punter.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to kick off XP and Win 7 at the same time.

Because I can.