Presents for me (sort of)

I finally bought those things I said I was going to for my Dell Inspiron 6000. I got a 2nd AC adapter (reason: big pain in the ass to unplug the adapter every time I have to take the laptop somewhere) and a new mini-mouse. The adapter dropped in price fortunately, it was 26 bucks. The mouse, 9 bucks.

I also decided to splurge and bought another stick of RAM for my '6000. It's a 512MB stick which will bring the total to 1GB of RAM. I could have gone to 1.5GB of RAM but I said "nah" because it's only a Celeron processor.

Interesting note about the whole RAM thing concerning the '6000: It would appear the RAM-controller is limited to 400MHz.

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Note before continuing: RAM does have different speeds. The higher the MegaHertz, the faster it is - if your controller on your motherboard supports it. For example, a slower RAM on a desktop computer is DDR 266, also known as PC2100 RAM. A "faster" RAM would be DDR 400, also known as PC 3200 RAM.

If your RAM controller is only limited to a certain speed, the RAM will revert to the maximum limit the controller can handle. For example, if you put in a DDR 400 stick of RAM into a motherboard that can only support DDR 266, the RAM will only run at DDR 266 and not any higher.

If you "mix" speeds with sticks of RAM, the same thing happens. If you have two sticks of RAM, one 512MB stick of DDR 400 and one stick of DDR 266, if you place them on the same board, they will run at the slower speed to stay "compatible" with each other.

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Anyway, back to the RAM thing on the '6000. The RAM controller only supports DDR2 RAM with 400MHz speeds. There has been plenty of discussion on the Dell Message Board about this so I guess it's true.

I decided to buy the stick of RAM directly from Dell for two reasons. The first is because it's made by Dell, therefore Dell supported (and the laptop is still under warranty). The second reason is that I know it will absolutely 100% work in this laptop.

What sucked is what I paid for it. 97 bucks. OUCH. I could have very easily bought it elsewhere and saved around 15 bucks, but.. it's that whole warranty thing. If I buy a stick of RAM and it goes sour and screws up my mainboard, Dell ain't about to go and fix that - that would be my fault for not using true Dell parts.

Ah well, such is life. When you own a newer computer, you pay the bucks for the parts.

Funny note: Were I to buy the same about of RAM for the Dell Dimension 4400 (which uses PC2100 DDR 266 RAM), the price is 35 bucks.