John's Blog - Rants, Raves, and Geeky Thoughts

Black Friday....Red Checkbook

I went to bed last night and even woke up today reassuring myself that I wouldn't cave and buy anything today. I had been surfing the Anandtech Hot Deals forums, and Fat Wallet forums though and knew what the good deals would be. All would have been fine until I got to work and my coworker said we were about to run out of toilet paper and should probably go to Staples and buy some. Normally I would have resisted, but I was weak and decided that since I would be busy with school again next week it would be good to go if we wanted the luxury of having toilet paper at work.

We drove to Carbondale and once inside the manager (or whoever gets to wear the "nicer" shirts at Staples handed us a flyer indicating what items were still in stock and where to find them. We went to the copy counter and my coworker asked if they had any more hard drives in stock. The guys behind the counter handed it across. It was a 30 gig 7200 rpm Maxtor. There was no price indicated on the sheet and I asked how much it was. The ever so unhappy looking guy behind the counter sighed out that it was $79.99 with a $50 mail in rebate. The guy with me didn't want, but I decided to take it. Never can have too much storage. I figured it might start an upgrade path to move the hard drive in this machine from a Quantum Bigfoot to something nicer, maybe even semi-reliable.

I also found a stick of 128 megs of PC133 PNY memory for $20 with a $15 mail in rebate. I picked this up as well figuring it would also make a good upgrade for this machine. The sales person asked how fast the bus speed was of the computer was it was going into and I just said 66. I wish I would have thought about that before I said it. The Staples guy took that as an opportunity to extert his technological prowess. He told me that pc133 ram was not backwards compatible. I politely told him that it was indeed since it was a maximum rating, much like speeds on blank cd-r's. He persisted and told me that he tried it and the other stick would be better. I told him that this stick would be better for future uses since it was capable of a 133 fsb and had better rebates on it too. He caved and handed me the ram.

I took the ram to work and plugged it in to only find it detecting 64 megs. Hmmmm. I took it home and popped it into my trust old Abit something board with a 440BX chipset. Still just 64 megs....not good. I popped it into the other computer with the ECS-K7S5A motherboard (nice board for the price, btw) and sure enough it found all 128 megs. All of a sudden it sunk in, and I confirmed my suspicions with a quick trip to the PNY website. Even 128 meg sticks now come as high density. It used to be just 256 meg dimms and up came as HD. I guess I'll return this and just order some from Crucial or something. I'm afriad if the guy is working then though and sees me returning it I will have to clarify that he was right but had the reason incorrectly.

One more test post...

I wanted to make one more test post to check out the formatting that the style sheet I'm using is doing on the page. I'm also curious to see how it handles the uploading of pictures. Here is a picutre of my Thanksgiving dinner. And here is some text that should be wrapped at the bottom that should look fine.....

Thanksgiving Dinner

I have to work Friday and since I haven't gotten to change my oil lately due to rounded off oil plug on my car I decided to stay in Carbondale for Thanksgiving this year and go home this weekend. I did this last year too since I had to answer the tech support phones on Thanksgiving then. I really just wanted this as an excuse to add another entry to check formatting.

First Entry...

Out of boredom I've setup a movable type blog today. I would have set it up on my primary domain, cyber-byte.com but for mysql access I'd have to pay my host quite a bit more. I'm going to host it on a test machine I have for now and maybe if I get to like it, I will host it some place better.