Amanda has Alzheimer's: A Building the Perfect Beast Postscript.
Amanda (My AMD Duo Core Goddess) has been having a problem. She tend to forget where she puts things. This is understandable since she is over 4 years old. Last time I had the blue screen of death Amanda had a bad memory DIMM. The fix was pulling the 512 MB DIMM. Problem solved. The Stick sat on my desk for over six months, until I had time to get a replacement from NeoComputer. The DIMM has a lifetime warranty so I can get a new one for free. After ordering one and waiting for a week, I return to find the the store clerk forgot to place the order. (Aside: the NeoComputer in Iowa City seems to have gone downhill in terms of quality.) Long story short: I walk out with a new 1 GB DIMM.

I go home and put my sexy bitch up on the bench and proceed to fondle her innards. She get her six month "dust and suck": CPU, Fans, filters, and GPUs get cleared of all the dust they pick up during the winter. I installed the new DIMM. and we are off and running. Things are great for about two hours of WoW time, but Amanda starts to act funny. POW! Blue Screen of Death (BOD). After a reboot and resetting somethings breaks again after 2 hours: BOD! This happens every time I tax her system with too much information: Playing a Game, while surfing sites with lots of Flash. (Damn You Jello PORN!)

I think I've got a bad stick of memory, but after doing some digging I thinking it is something else. Amanda is partially handicapped. She is a 64 bit processor using 32 Bit Windows XP. Windows XP (32 Bit) can only see about 4 GB of memory period. That includes allocation for RAM, I/O, Cards, Graphics Cards, OS Kernel Space, and a crap load of overhead. Amanda has always been a little twitchy when over 2 GB of RAM. Now I think I know the reason.

Window XP (32 Bit) likes to have 3.5 Gigs of RAX max allocated for running programs and data. The other 512 MB of RAM is for WindowsXP and bookkeeping. That's a gross simiplification, but it makes this next part easier to understand. By adding that new stick of RAM Amanda sometimes loses her mind: 3 GB of RAM, 1 GB of Ram on the Dual SLI Video Card, all that space needed for WIndows XP, USB Card, 3 hard drives, Sound card, and butch of I/O devices. So she forgets where things are placed, which leads to the BOD. The solution is getting Amanda to do 64 bits instead of 32.

Amanda is more than capable of doing such a feat. When she first came off the bench I had her doing Windows XP in 64 bits. XP64 was buggy as a candied apple sitting on an anthill, and many of the drivers I needed weren't 64 bit ready yet. So Amanda got the specail needs version of Windows XP (the 32 bits). That was four years ago, so it's time to make the jump.

Since, she is going back on the bench, I should give her a face lift and a tummy tuck as well. So I need to save some cash for the following: Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit), another DIMM stick 1 GB (Bringing her total to 4 GB), and another Hard Drive for the System. True, I could just reformat the old one, but I want to keep the old drive as a backup. This should set me back about $300.