Friday, June 10, 2005

Feeling smarter, faster

I doubled the memory in my desktop computer today and can finally run Photoshop CS at something approaching a reasonable speed.
I have a Dell Dimension 8200 that came with 512MB of RAM. That seemed like plenty until I installed Photoshop CS a couple of months ago. It loaded like molasses and took a little short of forever to load its browser with images from our Nikon D100s.
So I went to the Dell site and determined it would cost me $349.99 to kick the memory up to 1GB.
I complained to my computer mentor Tim, who does a brisk business helping his neighors in Alma, Colo., sort out their PC problems and he suggested I shop around. He also sent me a copy of a diagnostic program that helped me determine precisely what kind of memory my Dell needed.
My shopping led me to memory4less.com and what appeared to be the very same Samsung memory Dell was offering, but for only $195. I placed the order Monday and it arrived in today's mail.
It took me all of 5 minutes to shut down the computer, open it up, snap the new memory into the two remaining memory slots and fire up the machine.
It noticed the new memory right away and put it to work immediately.
And I'm enjoying the $155 I saved by not paying Dell's price.
The bad news in today's mail was the absence of a rent check from my tenant - the one I gave a break to two weeks ago when she said her paycheck was short due to a medical absence from work.
Our arrangement was that she would send me the rent check straightaway and I would hold it until today, which is when she gets her next paycheck.
Well, here we are on check-cashing day and there's no rent check. I was even such a sympathetic sap that I waived the $50 late penalty that is provided for in the lease.
What a dope. No more Mr. Nice Guy. From now on, it's purely business.

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