Memory | PC Pro blog

How a wonky DIMM ruined my server upgrade

Friday, December 16th, 2011

As you may be able to see in the highest-resolution version of the snapshot above (click to enlarge), it’s not every day one comes across a physically distorted DIMM.

This is one of a set of eight 4GB sticks, originally intended to boost the performance of a Hyper-V host machine at Ratcliffe & Brown Wines & Spirits, the subject of a forthcoming PC Pro Business Clinic. The server upgrade wasn’t part of the subject, but it pretty quickly turned into a source of aggravation – this bendy SIMM is not immediately apparent until it’s placed on a flat surface, and I tend to land DIMMs on a lump of textile, like a mouse mat or a rucksack; anything but a conductive perfectly flat plane like a rack-mounted server lid.

Surprisingly, it sat in the DIMM slot perfectly well. Unsurprisingly, the server (a Dell PowerEdge 2970) spat the dummy the minute power was restored, quite accurately complaining about “unusable memory” in the scrolling front-panel display.

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Tags: memory, server, SIMM

Posted in: Real World Computing

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The phone data that’s a nightmare to delete

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Roughly a quarter of all phones are discarded with enough personal data left in them to identify their owner, according to a new study. Given my recent experience, I’m surprised that figure isn’t somehere in the high nineties, because deleting data from a modern phone is like trying to clear sand off a beach with a pair of tweezers.

My esteemed editor recently handed me the Nokia E71 he’d been testing. Because he’s a stickler for reviewing kit properly, it was stuffed full of his personal data, including his Exchange email, text messages and contacts.

Once I’d sent an email to our publisher with Tim’s recommendation of a huge pay rise for the hard-working, irreplaceable, online editor, I set about trying to wipe the data. First, I formatted the memory card, but it seems all Tim’s personal files were stored on the phone’s internal memory and, oddly, there was no obvious way to format that.

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Tags: memory, Nokia E71, recycling

Posted in: Green, Hardware, Newsdesk

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Back to school with a bump

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

We’ve all read the stories over the years about exams getting easier, but I always just assumed they were Daily Mail rabble-rousing rubbish. But having sat a GCSE ICT exam for myself – that’s an exam intended to tax 16 year-olds by the way – I can safely say they’re getting, if anything, more difficult. And not in a good way.

As my rather embarrassing performance demonstrates, actual IT understanding didn’t seem to play a huge part in the marking of the paper. On questions requiring written answers, you could have written an entire page of sound argument, but if you didn’t include the precise terms or points in the mark scheme, you lost the mark.

In fact, the whole experience went a long way to convincing me of a common argument: that today’s exams are largely based around training pupils to memorise the particular key facts they’re expected to know.

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Tags: GCSE, ICT, memory

Posted in: Rant

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