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.

I don’t see many DIMMs that wobble to and fro when put down, or double as a leaf-spring the other side up

There didn’t seem to be a “too much torque on DIMM slot 8″ message, even though this was the source of the problem. I’d felt something a bit peculiar with the memory in my hand, but decided it was worth a try: in this particular case, the server was going from 16GB up to 32GB, and if one stick was faulty then we would have to take out the other half of the matching pair, reducing the available RAM to a comparatively meagre 24GB.

Once back out of the machine and laid on a flat plate, the bend became detectable: I don’t see many DIMMs that wobble to and fro when put down, or double as a leaf-spring the other side up: what amazes me is how it got through the memory vendor’s QA processes. Perhaps their tester has jaws that clamp the edge connectors firmly enough that the sundry distorted open-circuits on the stick are forced shut. But it’s visible even when the DIMM has gone back in the packaging, and doubly so when stacked in a pile with other, perfectly normal DIMMs.

Which leaves two questions: how on Earth do you put a permanent bend in a thing as strong as a plank of fibreglass? And, secondly, how did it manage to leave the factory?

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.

So I dug out the manual and hard reset the phone to factory settings, but incredibly that wasn’t enough to shift the data either.   Which means either Nokia is pre-installing the personal data of PC Pro staff on all of its handsets or the hard reset is about as hard as The Sun crossword.

In the end, I resorted to deleting the data manually from each of the relevant folders. And it seems I’m not the only one who has trouble scrubbing data from Nokia devices. “It has taken us over a year to get talks going with Nokia that now allows us to wipe their phones,” said John Godfrey, from mobile recycling service, Sims Lifecycle Services, talking to The Guardian.  “To wipe it, you have to be able to access all the memory – and manufacturers don’t want you to do that for all sorts of commercial reasons.”

That’s plainly not good enough. Mobile phones are probably more recycle-worthy than any other gadget, because the networks tempt customers to upgrade long before the phone ceases functioning. But there’s no way consumers, and especially businesses, will send their phones to be reused if there’s any chance their sensitive data will go with it. Even my manual delete wouldn’t prevent a determined hacker from retrieving infromation from the phone’s memory. 

Instead of adding barcode readers, novelty wallpapers or all manner of other useless gubbins on our handsets, the phone makers should be working on a simple way to erase user data. It can’t be that difficult – Windows does it without even trying!

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.

Barry’s example in his blog post is a great one: Mike correctly stated that sending an email is better for the environment than writing a letter, but as the exam board hadn’t thought of that he couldn’t get the mark.

Similarly, in a two-mark question about how to deliver a finished graphics document to a client, I offered up email as one of several answers – which got me the first mark. Common sense dictates that anyone putting this answer would know to actually attach the file to the email first, but as I didn’t specifically state this that second mark eluded me (and that’s despite me listing FTP and CD/DVD as alternatives, both of which were also only valid for that first mark – in the latter case the second mark was given, unbelievably, for specifically saying you’d then give the disc to the client).

There’s undoubtedly a way of passing these types of exams, but it doesn’t necessarily involve learning your subject properly. Instead, it involves knowing the key terms that the marker is looking for, and teachers (with pressure on them to hit high pass rates) are undoubtedly aware of this. I’m sure it’s not just IT that has this problem – I seem to remember taking that exact approach to one of my weakest subjects back when I had GCSEs coming out of my ears. But it’s the IT industry that’s complaining of a lack of adequately trained applicants, and if this is the start they get it’s not hard to see why.