Do You Want a Faster Computer?

We learned how to speed up our four-year-old laptop computer this week. What a difference! When our daughter was hospitalized 1200 miles away from us, I planned to make the trip to help her out when she returned home from the hospital. Because my husband and I share one laptop, it would mean one of us would have to do without access to a computer. No e-mail? No Internet? No way!

We dragged out our old laptop, plugged it in, and waited for it to boot up. Oh my goodness, but it was sooooooo slow. Even after defragging, cleaning the disc, emptying recycle bin and cookies, etc, the machine took forever to load. Did we need to bite the bullet and buy a new one just for that week or two weeks we would be apart?

We started shopping for an inexpensive laptop. We asked the salesman about our old one. He suggested we check online at http://www.crucial.com/ to have them examine the old one and see what was in it. Bumping up the RAM (Random Access Memory) would speed it up.

Sure enough, we discovered our old laptop only had 256 mb of memory. These days most laptops are sold with 2 gigs-4gigs (gigabytes) of memory.  We paid about $50.00 including shipping for one gb. When it arrived in the mail, my husband simply used a small screw driver to open up the compartment and plugged the memory in. That was it! He started up the laptop and it hummed to life. It performed much faster.

I am happy to report the laptop is speedier and my daughter has recovered and returned to work.

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