Live to fight another day (Crucial memory)

Member Name: grahamt

Product:	Crucial memory
Date:	15/01/02 (294 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Good support, Good product

Disadvantages: None

About four years ago I had my old laptop stolen off the back seat of my car. Yes, OK, I know, silly of me to leave it there! Normally I would have agreed with you except that it was stolen in broad daylight on the forecourt of a busy petrol station, the car was locked and the computer case was strapped down with the seat belt!

The evidence of the forecourt video camera showed that the thief drove up alongside my car at the next pump, jumped out, smashed the glass in the rear door, leaned in, undid the seatbelt, pulled the bag out of the broken window, jumped back into the car and drove off, all in about 10 seconds. The car had been stolen two months before.

Actually, I wondered what the thief thought when he found out what he'd got. It was even then well out-of-date, a Toshiba Tecra 510CDT with a Pentium 133mhz CPU and Windows95. It can't have been worth more than £50, if that. He probably wouldn't have got even enough for a packet of fags. He probably wanted enough for his next fix. Tough!

I expected never to see it again. I put in a claim against my insurance and bought replacements. The most serious loss was of the data. Fortunately I had backed up the machine only about 10 days before.

About a six months later I got a call out of the blue from the police. Could they come and see me? They had raided a known dealer in stolen computer equipment and amongst the hundreds of machines they thought they had found mine. Could I positively identify it?

I could!

All that had been recovered was the basic machine. None of the additional equipment, not even the external floppy drive. They had even taken out half of the memory (you knew this was leading up to something relevant didn't you. Hope it was worth the wait). All it had left was the basic 16meg.

I let the insurance company know that the police had the machine and advised them that if they wanted to recover it after the pol
ice had finished with it as evidence then they should contact the police. They obviously never bothered because about a year later the police told me I could come and collect it, the case was closed.

So, now I had a second machine. What to use it for? Well, with just 16meg of memory and such a slow processor, Windows was out-of-the-question. What about Linux? I always wanted to have a play with that.

A power lead was an easy and cheap replacement and an old floppy drive and an external docking bay was obtained from the store of redundant equipment at work. The machine still had its CDROM drive. So now at least I could boot up and install something.

I never got Linux to work. Oh, I got it installed but the the screen definition (600X400X8 bit colour) made it unusable. Supposedly this machine will support Linux but I know little enough about UNIX and Windows has made me lazy. I no longer have any desire to "get my hands dirty". I did that for thirty years and the novelty has worn off!

So, Windows then but 16meg makes this a problem. Need more memory!

Everywhere I looked, even a basic extra 16meg to put it back to where it was would cost over £100, more than the entire machine was worth!

Suddenly I came across www.crucial.com. The website is US based and all the memory they sell is priced in dollars, of course. They deliver all over the world. They had 64meg of appropriate memory for about £28, including delivery, less than ¼ of the price anywhere else.

I placed an order and waited for delivery. Instead I got an email from them letting me know that they had a UK based organisation and would I prefer to order through them? It would probably be cheaper and I would get it quicker, without any Customs hassles.

I said, thank you very much and please cancel the order. I went to their UK website (www.crucial.com/uk) and ordered the same memory for just £26.43, including deliver
y! It arrived the next day.

I plugged it in, switched on the machine and the memory was immediately recognised. I now had 80meg of memory, something I could really work with.

I have now reinstalled Windows, this time Windows98. I couldn't install WindowsMe. It won't install on machines with processors slower than 233mhz. I've installed a bunch of software, including the latest Beta of Sun StarOffice (I'm impressed) but basically I plan to use the machine on the home network as a print and file server.

My daughter has a later Tecra model I picked up from a colleague for a few quid. It had 32meg of memory but was still memory constrained. She let it be known that some extra memory for her machine would be acceptable, well it was Christmas!

I checked for the memory for what I thought I remembered her machine was. The price was the same. I ordered it. When I checked her machine I found I had got the model wrong. Her machine wasn't even listed! I emailed Crucial and explained the situation. Almost immediately I got an email back confirming that the memory I had ordered would be suitable. It was!

I can't recommend Crucial highly enough. Their service is second to none, their product is excellent and their prices are unbeatable. Try them.

Summary: