magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

Since getting my new computer I never found myself with the impulse to gloat over how much RAM was in it, nor any other reason to even look at the RAM section in the System Profiler. Over the weekend, while checking out something else, it caught my eye. 4.5 GiB. 'What the hell?' I said. 'That's two gigs short.'

I pulled my invoice out of my receipts box. Or rather, from on top of my receipts box, because apparently even something as simple as filing a piece of folder into an accordion file is Too Much Effort™. Sure enough, I paid for four 1 GiB chips, but it seemed two were missing.

So I slid Pomegranate out from beneath my desk and opened the case. Wait. I slid Pomegranate out from beneath my desk and realised that I didn't know how to open the case of a G5 tower. 'Ah ha, the case release is also the security cable latch cover.' I opened the case.

And there's a RAM chip, sitting on the floor of the case, lodged beneath the fan. So I shut the computer down. (Yes, I had the case open and was poking around inside without shutting it down. I've hot-swapped internal SCSI hard drives without shutting a machine down before.) Pulled the fan unit out to get at the RAM chip. Stuck it back in its socket. 'They must work in pairs, which is why it wasn't recognizing its partner either.' Put everything back together. Rebooted.

Still 2.5 GiB.

Shut down. Took it all back apart. Made sure the chips were seated firmly. Restarted. No luck. I called Dan to report the problem. 'I'm pretty sure I checked after installing the RAM to make sure that it recognised it all and had the right amount.'

'I guess it could have fallen out during transport, and have just been sitting there under the fan since I've had the machine at my house. And it seems like sitting under the fan for a month has damaged the chip.'

Dan hand delivered two replacement chips to me after he finished work today. And now I'm up and running at intended capacity. Not that I've done any work yet that would require this much RAM. But when that huge graphics file or video editing project comes down the pike, I'll be prepared.