Kyle D. Skrinak

I have an old “Windows XP Ready!” (remember those stickers?) HP Pavilion N5450 laptop; Pentium III 800 MHz, 256 MB RAM that has been slowly, slowly running Windows XP for several years now. We now use it for the occasional news or recipe lookup in our kitchen. I would often have the passing thought to “add more RAM” as I would randomly wait for the system to catch up with the long-spinning hard drive’s attempt to read and write to virtual memory. Of course, adding RAM to an old machine is a big bother, and, is it worth the cost and trouble? I had tried loading ubuntu on the laptop but the CD installer drops into an endless loop before the video driver loads.

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