I have an unfortunate tendency to put up with minor and easily fixable annoyances for far too long. Case in point: this computer.
One of my RAM chips went bad a while back—it's probably been seven months or more by now. I have a circa 2007 iMac that can only handle a total of 4GB of RAM on its two RAM chips, so with the bad chip gone, I was limping along on 2GB.
That was halfway workable at first until I needed a new printer. With the new printer came an updated operating system which needed a minimum of 2GB of RAM to operate at all.
The feeling of elation at being able to print again was greatly diminished by the fact that my computer was as slow as molasses...in January...on the moon.
It was so bad that I sometimes couldn't even wake the computer up from the screen saver without jiggling the mouse and then walking away for a while to give it time to recover. Finally, it decided that Facebook was more of a resource hog than it could afford, so it started loading only one page of news feed results and refusing to show me my pending notifications. Facebook is where I hang out in my spare time, so that could not stand.
Fortunately, I am in the midst of a transformation right now. I belong to a private Facebook group (see!) that is dedicated to retrieving our lives and homes from the chaos, mess, clutter and inefficiencies that we have allowed to take over. Everyone checks in weekly if not more often, and it's been amazing how great it is just having the support of other people who also tend to let things go too long.
My primary project with this group so far has been to make my home office more functional. I've started by trying to physically clean up the room, but I decided it was also time to get my computer back to good working order. I finally had a little extra money and I went online and bought 4GB of RAM (I figured it might be worthwhile to start with two fresh chips and keep a spare for later in case one goes bad again).
I installed it when I got home from work today and it is glorious. As in: I no longer want to throw my computer out the window.
Next on the agenda is to finish clearing out the actual mess in my office, but I have a good head start already. You should have seen the enormous box of paper I took to a local recycling event for shredding!
I have some other home cleanup and repair projects in the works right now as well, starting with getting some truly scary electrical stuff in my attic up to code. That happens tomorrow morning.
Sometimes life just kind of gets in its own way, I think. It's been good to sit back, set goals and make incremental progress. It took me a while to get this far, but I'm not turning back.
I am going to right now get up and get the stuff to clean off my screens and keyboard. I've put up with it way longer than I should have and you've inspired me. Nothing can be done about the missing 7 key at this point now that I have waited so long though.
Posted by: Tarrant | May 11, 2015 at 10:38 AM