I’ve been visiting my Mother-in-Law in New York, we saw the Museum of Natural History yesterday, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art today, and I finally managed to give her my Hanukkah Gift to her.

I offered to upgrade the memory on her machine, a Dell Dimension L800r, from it’s current 128 meg to 512 meg of ram.

When she got it, it had Windoze ME, but she had to upgrade to Win XP, and with 128 meg, less a couple for video memory, it was slow, particularly after a nasty bit of spyware, and the multiple passes of various software to fix it, created a spaghetti registry.

I ordered the memory online, but they were out of stock, so today, before going to the museum, I hit B&H Photo Video in Manhattan, and picked up 2x 256M DIMMs.

Still slow, but not glacially so, and the CPU actually maxes out without the hard drive light indicating massive thrashing.

It’s still slow, but no longer glacial.