In an earlier post I explained how I installed extra memory for better computer performance, that was last August. Since then my computer started acting strangely. Don’t get me wrong, the performance gains were real and when the computer was running it worked beautifully. The problem was with the cold boot in the morning, it would not start until it warmed up a little, taking upwards of five minutes of “hand cranking” to start. Once it started, there was no ill effects. When I had lots of work to do, I began leaving it on all the time to save the trouble of restarting in the morning. It ran for weeks without any problems. [Read more...]

(After reading this, you may also want to read the update that I posted.)

This morning I added extra 2GB of RAM to bring the total memory to 4GB total. I made sure that I purchased the same type of memory as the originals, Corsair TWIN2X2048 from NewEgg.com. NewEgg is a great place to buy stuff, they really care about their customers. I have a story to prove it.

After installing the memory I did a Google search on whther further steps were necessary. The properties of my computer showed the total memory as 3.25GB, but I wanted to make sure. Good thing I did. There is a file in the root directory of the boot drive, typically drive C:, called boot.ini. It instructs Windows XP on special steps of features to enable during the boot time. There appears to be two relevant soft switces that may need to be added, they are /PAE and /3GB. They are simply added to the end of a line in the boot.ine file. So, my boot.ini line looked like the following, your boot.ini file may be different: [Read more...]