Slartibartfast
The word 'Nerd' is a compliment.
So, a few years ago, I won a laptop in a math competition, then valued at $600. It was, to put it gently, worthless. All its memory was taken up by start-up processes, which made it unbelievably slow. It sometimes took 15 minutes to start up; sometimes it never started. I kept using it, though, because it was a laptop. And it was mine. Regardless of how slow it was.
Finally, about a week ago (read: on my birthday), my dad got me a new memory card that doubled my physical memory and (I believe literally) more than quintupled the speed. So I got another of the same memory cards for another $20, and now I have 2 gigs of physical memory on a computer that finally, finally works. No more headaches or wanting to throw this stupid thing against a wall. I can actually start up and start browsing Firefox in a few seconds, rather than several minutes. So for a grand total of $40, my computer went from a worthless piece of junk to a very fast computer that should remain serviceable for as long as I need it to.
Finally, about a week ago (read: on my birthday), my dad got me a new memory card that doubled my physical memory and (I believe literally) more than quintupled the speed. So I got another of the same memory cards for another $20, and now I have 2 gigs of physical memory on a computer that finally, finally works. No more headaches or wanting to throw this stupid thing against a wall. I can actually start up and start browsing Firefox in a few seconds, rather than several minutes. So for a grand total of $40, my computer went from a worthless piece of junk to a very fast computer that should remain serviceable for as long as I need it to.
