My good mate Oliver Kelly relatedtotech.blogspot.com, who is a young geek sucking up all there is that we have in our geek world is hungry for information about RAM.
Well here is a bit about it that I'm sure he will find useful:
RAM stands for Random Access Memory. Simply because a processor in a PC may access any part of it at any time. Unlike in the old days of tape used for storage (old days for non backup use that is, tape is still the best there). Tape had to be wound to the correct position to load or save the data, not random access!
The best type of ram you can get is Static RAM. This RAM uses a type of chip that has the fastest access speed. Yes, RAM has a speed. The processor must wait for the RAM to deliver the goods. Static RAM, or SRAM is so bloody expensive that you will not have much in your PC, if any. I mean a few years ago I could buy a 8KB, Yes 8 Kilo Byte SRAM chip for £3. A gigabyte of the stuff? If I was a government, perhaps lol
So modern PC's tend to use Dynamic RAM, or DRAM. This RAM is much cheaper to make. But it has a downside, its much much slower than SRAM.
This is because DRAM is forgetfull. The data that is stored in it must be automoatically refreshed several times a second, this slows down the access time.
However, DRAM has gotten much faster than its original version. We call modern DRAM memory DDR.
DDR stands for Double Data Rate. To try and speed up DRAM, designers came up with the idea that they could speed it up by letting the processor take or store twice as many bits at the same time as before. So if you were storing 16 bits at a time before, now the memory controller would let you store 32 at a time. So they Doubled the Data Rate :-D
DDR was replaced with DDR2, which increased the speed even more by running faster than DDR and along with a few other changes allowed the processor to store 64bits at a time! Doubling the data rate a second time.
Now my PC is using DDR3 :-D which is the latest version, soon to be replaced with DDR4. DDR2 and DDR3 are common in shops, DDR not so.
Memory prices change every day due to many things including how many the manufacturer decided to make at that time. I remember one time DDR2 was very cheap. Then it more than doubled in price in a week! A 1GB stick of DDR2 RAM went from £25 to £50 or higher.
If you have an old PC that uses DDR and you wish to upgrade, best do so when DDR2 or DDR3 is nice and cheap!
There used to be the idea that adding more RAM speeds up the PC. That used to be the case for something like an Amiga, where more RAM really made a massive difference, but modern PC's have so much that most of it goes unused.
It is true that with too little RAM your PC will be running very slow. Adding more ram will speed it up, but only to a point. Having loads of ram is good for letting you handle loads of data and applications at the same time.
Hopfully Oliver Kelly got something out of that. There is a lot more to it but I dont know all of it myself lol
As a sort of mini interview I asked Oliver what he thought about cheap android tablets, you know the ones from china. We both got one each and have been using them for a while now:
Too be honest. Very very inspressed. The way they take the materials and build them then create amazing rom's and its so cheap and there quite good but the free apps are quite on the downside whats your opinion?
and so I answered:
Well the hardware is quite good. Mine runs at 1ghz, as fast as the my android phone.
They fall down with bad and cheap batteries. Also the original rom may not be the best for tablet use.
I did find a guide that shows how to open my tablet and change the battery. I may give it a go.
Take a look at Olivers blog: relatedtotech.blogspot.com
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
Sunday, 22 July 2012
My camera died yesterday :'(
Yesterday I visited the 2012 river festival in bedford, the second largest festival in the UK (the first being Notting Hill).
Over 2 whole days the entire river and surrounding area plays host to hundreds of thousands of people, fireworks, river events with parades and Viking dragon boat races, several music stages, beer, local and non-local food (mmm the Swedish mango beer was nice), a carnival, flypast and more I will go see later today.
It was at this festival yesterday that I lost a dear friend. My camera.
I love photography, and am a big fan of film. I don't use film at the moment due to space issues but that's changing. Other than my phone I have only 2 digital cameras, a Fuji s8000fd and a Canon HV30 HD camcorder.
I tend to leave the HV30 for filming purposes as it is a camcorder, but it dose take still photos, better than the Fuji tbh.
The Fuji was my first proper digital camera. It was a birthday present from 2007 I think. I have used it at events like the festival, holidays and family birthdays. It also took one of the first pictures of my first newborn nephew.
Its been love hate. I have loved some of its features and hated the lack of, or stupidity of others lol. I never felt it could replace my film slr's. Manual focus was laughable, the electronic viewfinder was useless (viewfinders should be high resolution or optical with digital overlay) and high speed shooting wasn't what I wanted it to be.
However it was very good at macro, brilliant at letting me preview depth of field no matter what the aperture (you can loose so much light with a film camera its difficult to preview) and had a nice flash.
Sad to say I can't use it anymore. Yesterday while recording a demo of some Greek hoplites fighting some barbarians I noticed the image started looking like it was on fire! I knew it was the ccd, but I didn't think much of it as I have noticed funny things before with this camera. This time it was different because the distortion was recorded to the video and still images.
It went back to normal after I rebooted it. For a few mins I got some more video till I noticed more purple fires here and there, the image flickered, the hoplites started to melt into the scene, then it was normal, then it happened again and stayed that way.
Switch off, then on. Same.
Reset all settings. Same.
Take out batteries to try and 'cold boot'. No change.
At home upgrade firmware. Purple fire effect is now orange.
I did some Googling and found that it is a defect that affected many camera years ago. Looks like I was lucky it lasted so long:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/badccds.html
Well, now I can get that D-SLR I was thinking of upgrading to.
Goodbye old friend.
Over 2 whole days the entire river and surrounding area plays host to hundreds of thousands of people, fireworks, river events with parades and Viking dragon boat races, several music stages, beer, local and non-local food (mmm the Swedish mango beer was nice), a carnival, flypast and more I will go see later today.
It was at this festival yesterday that I lost a dear friend. My camera.
I love photography, and am a big fan of film. I don't use film at the moment due to space issues but that's changing. Other than my phone I have only 2 digital cameras, a Fuji s8000fd and a Canon HV30 HD camcorder.
I tend to leave the HV30 for filming purposes as it is a camcorder, but it dose take still photos, better than the Fuji tbh.
The Fuji was my first proper digital camera. It was a birthday present from 2007 I think. I have used it at events like the festival, holidays and family birthdays. It also took one of the first pictures of my first newborn nephew.
Its been love hate. I have loved some of its features and hated the lack of, or stupidity of others lol. I never felt it could replace my film slr's. Manual focus was laughable, the electronic viewfinder was useless (viewfinders should be high resolution or optical with digital overlay) and high speed shooting wasn't what I wanted it to be.
However it was very good at macro, brilliant at letting me preview depth of field no matter what the aperture (you can loose so much light with a film camera its difficult to preview) and had a nice flash.
Sad to say I can't use it anymore. Yesterday while recording a demo of some Greek hoplites fighting some barbarians I noticed the image started looking like it was on fire! I knew it was the ccd, but I didn't think much of it as I have noticed funny things before with this camera. This time it was different because the distortion was recorded to the video and still images.
It went back to normal after I rebooted it. For a few mins I got some more video till I noticed more purple fires here and there, the image flickered, the hoplites started to melt into the scene, then it was normal, then it happened again and stayed that way.
Switch off, then on. Same.
Reset all settings. Same.
Take out batteries to try and 'cold boot'. No change.
At home upgrade firmware. Purple fire effect is now orange.
I did some Googling and found that it is a defect that affected many camera years ago. Looks like I was lucky it lasted so long:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/badccds.html
Well, now I can get that D-SLR I was thinking of upgrading to.
Goodbye old friend.
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
Yes sir! I'd like a slice of Raspberry Pi!
Just before the days that I was in school kids used computers that did not do everything for them. They had to program them or load a program they or someone else made. Programming was partof the curriculum and all kids were taught how the computer worked and made it do anything they wanted. These kids ended up as the programmers that today make our phones work as well as operating systems for pc's and games.
Later the computers came with more and more software already written and programming was seen as less and less an important lesson. Kids started learning only how to format spreadsheets and not how to make a game or have
the computer do something that it didnt do before.
This did not stop me however luckily my first computer was a commodore 64. After turning it on it would sit there asking you for programming. All the other kids were moving from such machines to PC's and many never even felt the need to program them. At school the machines there were Acorns running RISC OS. They were fun to play with and hack ;-) but the most fun I had was with the older BBC Model B machine used during german classes. I went on it a lunchtimes, not to learn german but to program it. Other kids used to watch me as I made the thing beep and draw all sorts of patterns on the screen, simple things to me, that to them were like magic.
That all ended. Now some of these machines are sitting here in my bedroom. Turned on from time to time for a little bit of fun. The kids just use windows at school, loading programs that they have no idea how they work, written by the kids who learned to program in school all that time ago.
But some of those kids from that time wish to change that...
Now, from the creator of the best game the BBC computer ever had, "Elite", comes the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a small, low power (can run off 5v USB or AA batteries), computer running linux with 128 or 256MB ram, USB, HDMI, Ethernet network port and an SD Card slot. Plug in an SD Card with the OS on it, a keyboard, mouse and screen and you have a fully functional linux computer for only about £20. Yes, the most expensive version of the Raspberry Pi will cost around £20!
It is hoped that schools can afford to give these to kids, so that every kid may have a programmable machine that can even fit in a pocket. They can learn to program and hack them using any programming language but Python is supported out
of the box.
I will be getting one once they are avaliable at the end of Feb.
Links:
David Braben, creator of Elite, shows off his Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi project page, and where to buy some Pi
Later the computers came with more and more software already written and programming was seen as less and less an important lesson. Kids started learning only how to format spreadsheets and not how to make a game or have
the computer do something that it didnt do before.
This did not stop me however luckily my first computer was a commodore 64. After turning it on it would sit there asking you for programming. All the other kids were moving from such machines to PC's and many never even felt the need to program them. At school the machines there were Acorns running RISC OS. They were fun to play with and hack ;-) but the most fun I had was with the older BBC Model B machine used during german classes. I went on it a lunchtimes, not to learn german but to program it. Other kids used to watch me as I made the thing beep and draw all sorts of patterns on the screen, simple things to me, that to them were like magic.
That all ended. Now some of these machines are sitting here in my bedroom. Turned on from time to time for a little bit of fun. The kids just use windows at school, loading programs that they have no idea how they work, written by the kids who learned to program in school all that time ago.
But some of those kids from that time wish to change that...
Now, from the creator of the best game the BBC computer ever had, "Elite", comes the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a small, low power (can run off 5v USB or AA batteries), computer running linux with 128 or 256MB ram, USB, HDMI, Ethernet network port and an SD Card slot. Plug in an SD Card with the OS on it, a keyboard, mouse and screen and you have a fully functional linux computer for only about £20. Yes, the most expensive version of the Raspberry Pi will cost around £20!
It is hoped that schools can afford to give these to kids, so that every kid may have a programmable machine that can even fit in a pocket. They can learn to program and hack them using any programming language but Python is supported out
of the box.
I will be getting one once they are avaliable at the end of Feb.
Links:
David Braben, creator of Elite, shows off his Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi project page, and where to buy some Pi
Thursday, 5 January 2012
My TV Died. RIP?
Yesterday I came home to find that the main family TV had died after only 3 years of use. It is a Sony HD LCD (720p and 1080i) and it was not tuning into any digital stations and there was a wierd blue bar of colour going down one side of the screen. Other inputs such as scart and component were displaying an image but there was no sound.
As a geek who realises that the average TV is just a computer with a tuner and a screen I began thinking "It's crashed" and my first geek instinct was "Reset it". Now that should be simple you would think? Nope.
I needed to make sure that the hardware was fully reset. The only reset option I could find was to reset the picture settings. I pressed all sorts of combinations of buttons and no luck. I started googling, not much there but user manuals, that I had to pay for lol. I suddenly remembered that most TV's have a service menu where you could calibrate the colours on a more accurate level. Perhaps I can reset in that!
Further googling found a youtube video showing me how to get into the service menu. I had to put the TV in standby and (this will work on Sony Bravia LCD TV's where the model number starts KDL)
Which it did. :-)
That fixed the sound for the inputs :-) But the digital tuner still wont work. Looks like it blew and that caused the crash. Good thing the DVD recorder can be used as a tuner!
Thankyou to the poster of this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J6w8cHRKu0
As a geek who realises that the average TV is just a computer with a tuner and a screen I began thinking "It's crashed" and my first geek instinct was "Reset it". Now that should be simple you would think? Nope.
I needed to make sure that the hardware was fully reset. The only reset option I could find was to reset the picture settings. I pressed all sorts of combinations of buttons and no luck. I started googling, not much there but user manuals, that I had to pay for lol. I suddenly remembered that most TV's have a service menu where you could calibrate the colours on a more accurate level. Perhaps I can reset in that!
Further googling found a youtube video showing me how to get into the service menu. I had to put the TV in standby and (this will work on Sony Bravia LCD TV's where the model number starts KDL)
- Put the TV in standby using the remote
- Press on the remote the following buttons: [i+], [5] , [VOL+], [ANALOG TV]
- After a sec a green menu should appear. BE CAREFULL IN TV SERVICE MENUS. You really really can bugger the thing up here.
- Now press 0 and 8
- The TV should reset.
Which it did. :-)
That fixed the sound for the inputs :-) But the digital tuner still wont work. Looks like it blew and that caused the crash. Good thing the DVD recorder can be used as a tuner!
Thankyou to the poster of this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J6w8cHRKu0
Monday, 19 December 2011
A quick post
I'll be posting a fuller entry soon. At the momemnt I'm deciding what that is.
Till then I'll direct you all to another blog, one that speaks to me quite well. I'm colourblind, red-green colourblind (there is more to this but I'll post about that later). The blog linked to below is quite a good one, he has even supplied pictures specialy treated so that those with "normal" vision can see what he sees. Looking at the pictures myself I see no difference, like him, so they too would show what I see.
Of course, I can not tell just how much difference there is between his pictures and what everyone else sees. For all I know it may not be that great.
Enjoy:
How a colour blind person sees the world
Till then I'll direct you all to another blog, one that speaks to me quite well. I'm colourblind, red-green colourblind (there is more to this but I'll post about that later). The blog linked to below is quite a good one, he has even supplied pictures specialy treated so that those with "normal" vision can see what he sees. Looking at the pictures myself I see no difference, like him, so they too would show what I see.
Of course, I can not tell just how much difference there is between his pictures and what everyone else sees. For all I know it may not be that great.
Enjoy:
How a colour blind person sees the world
Thursday, 24 November 2011
My weekend
So what was I doing over the weekend?
Riding my bike?
Playing Minecraft?
Well yes I did both of those. Pesky creepers. But I also decided to finally sort out all the recordings on my DVD recorder. For those of you who like model numbers, it is a Phillips DVDR3440h. An old 80GB recorder with no Freeview and a nasty cheap looking on-screen interface. Dont get me started on it's remote control.
So why do I keep it? Well for several reasons:
For a while now the dvd tray had been sticking. I was using the blade of my pen knife to convince it to come out. This stopped working over the last weekend, leaving me unable to eject the tray. So I decided to open the thing up and clean it, assuming that the problem was a load of dust making the drive belt slip. Below is a pic of the insides.
It did look pretty clean. The drive with the sticking tray is the black thing at the bottom right corner. I removed a load of screws and opened the drive up. Below is a pic of the drive, opened with the tray pulled out (I had removed some of the dust).
Riding my bike?
Playing Minecraft?
Well yes I did both of those. Pesky creepers. But I also decided to finally sort out all the recordings on my DVD recorder. For those of you who like model numbers, it is a Phillips DVDR3440h. An old 80GB recorder with no Freeview and a nasty cheap looking on-screen interface. Dont get me started on it's remote control.
So why do I keep it? Well for several reasons:
- It is my first recorder and I'm quite sentimental.
- Even though it has no digital tuner the analogue tuner is needed for viewing and recording the analogue signal from the SKY box downstairs.
- Out of my two recorders (the second one has Freeview) it is the only one that will blank a DVD+RW disc properly.
- I have converted it to a multi-region DVD player thus I can play my two US DVD's :-)
For a while now the dvd tray had been sticking. I was using the blade of my pen knife to convince it to come out. This stopped working over the last weekend, leaving me unable to eject the tray. So I decided to open the thing up and clean it, assuming that the problem was a load of dust making the drive belt slip. Below is a pic of the insides.
It did look pretty clean. The drive with the sticking tray is the black thing at the bottom right corner. I removed a load of screws and opened the drive up. Below is a pic of the drive, opened with the tray pulled out (I had removed some of the dust).
Just below the plastic tray you can see a black rubber belt. This is the belt that loads and ejects the tray. If the belt is slipping due to dust then I just need to dust it and "yay it works"... but take a closer look...
See all those lovely cracks in the black rubber belt? There's the problem! Those cracks are due to the age of the belt. It's now too weak to drive the disk tray. All is not lost though. These bands have been used since I was a kid in cassette players and are still used in othe drives like this one.
Off to Maplin to get a replacement! Came back from Maplin without one! Did not even have them in the catalogue.
Luckily I had several old drives laying about, so decided to see if they would be a donor for a new band. I spent most of saturday night probing around with tweezers down the throats of old drives pulling out bands that were either too big or just a little loose. One drive had no band at all, used gears instead, bugger.
So I got grumpy and decided just to order one of the net. I knew Maplin would have them to order so went there and low and behold there they were.
But wait, whats that?
A button to check the stock at the store?
Enter a postcode and...
Bedford store has 5 of of the blighters! Goes to show that nowadays you cant even trust a paper catalogue. I dont really like the catalogue since they changed it anyway.
So I went down on sunday, bought one, ripped open the drive againa and now it works perfectly.
Ahh the smell of electronics. What a wonderful weekend. Now to build a fence round my house in minecraft to keep out the creepers :-)
Friday, 18 November 2011
1st Post
Hello and wellcome to my blog ComputerDissection!
I am a Software Tester for a company in Milton Keynes and graduated from DeMontfort University with a 2nd level degree in computer science.
The title of this blog may be a little misleading ;-) The blog will be a mix of posts not just those concerning computers, although they will be the most common I bet. If it gets too much of a mess I'll get stuck in, sort it out and create a second blog.
This blog is also titled after my first website I created when I was 15, which was hosted at Geocities. It started out great with a load of info about computers, plus a page dedicated to Red Dwarf! But eventually it was replaced with a single page displaying "NOT HERE YET!". It stayed that way till Geocities shut down.
Thanks to Reocities.com who tried to make a mirror of geocities before it shut down you can still see it:
http://reocities.com/siliconvalley/platform/4857/
You can also find it on the wayback machine http://www.archive.org/web/web.php The address to search for is geocities.com/siliconvalley/platform/4857/
Of course if you were paying attention you will know you wont find much there. It's just a shame that all I have to show for my first foray on the net is a backed up page with 3 words on it lol.
So now I shall leave you with a really annoying feature of HTML, used a lot during the 90's as I was growing up: the BLINK tag :-)
I am a Software Tester for a company in Milton Keynes and graduated from DeMontfort University with a 2nd level degree in computer science.
The title of this blog may be a little misleading ;-) The blog will be a mix of posts not just those concerning computers, although they will be the most common I bet. If it gets too much of a mess I'll get stuck in, sort it out and create a second blog.
This blog is also titled after my first website I created when I was 15, which was hosted at Geocities. It started out great with a load of info about computers, plus a page dedicated to Red Dwarf! But eventually it was replaced with a single page displaying "NOT HERE YET!". It stayed that way till Geocities shut down.
Thanks to Reocities.com who tried to make a mirror of geocities before it shut down you can still see it:
http://reocities.com/siliconvalley/platform/4857/
You can also find it on the wayback machine http://www.archive.org/web/web.php The address to search for is geocities.com/siliconvalley/platform/4857/
Of course if you were paying attention you will know you wont find much there. It's just a shame that all I have to show for my first foray on the net is a backed up page with 3 words on it lol.
So now I shall leave you with a really annoying feature of HTML, used a lot during the 90's as I was growing up: the BLINK tag :-)
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