Is it worth adding more memory?

[Jeremy Harris]

Thanks to the generosity of @Onoff, the machine is now running on 8Gb and seems to be doing very well.  One thing that I found was that I was getting some hard memory errors showing up with the original memory, when I swapped over I had a couple of ours faffing around the get things to work, the problem turned up to be lots of dust around the memory sockets.  A good clean up and refitting the new (to me) memory fixed everything, and the machine's now running very nicely.  I have a suspicion that the high number of hard memory errors may have been a contributory factor, but can't be sure.

[SteamyTea]

So is FF using the same amount of memory of have you only used PaleMoon?

[Jeremy Harris]

23 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

So is FF using the same amount of memory of have you only used PaleMoon?

 

I'm sticking with Pale Moon.  So far I've not seen any downside.  It uses a lot less memory, is faster, works across different OS's seamlessly, has a an effective and secure sync feature and best of all looks and feels just like Firefox did before they messed up the user interface  while ago.

[Onoff]

Worth cleaning the accumulated dust from between the heatsink fins above the CPU if getting into an old pc. Often it's so fine and compact it's easily missed. Toothpick etc is pretty good for digging it out. Things can start getting hot and shutting down for no apparent reason.

[Jeremy Harris]

9 hours ago, Onoff said:

Worth cleaning the accumulated dust from between the heatsink fins above the CPU if getting into an old pc. Often it's so fine and compact it's easily missed. Toothpick etc is pretty good for digging it out. Things can start getting hot and shutting down for no apparent reason.

 

 

Definitely.  It took me a good hour yesterday to clean the mother board of this PC.  The caked on dust around the processor fan and cooler was a pig to remove, and the first memory slot is right next to the processor and was equally caked in very fine dust, as it seems the processor fan blows air out over it.

[dpmiller]

compressed air is your friend.

[Jeremy Harris]

3 minutes ago, dpmiller said:

compressed air is your friend.

 

 

It is, and I think if you regularly blow out the fan, heat sink, connectors etc it works fine.

 

In this case I had to resort to using a small brush as the dust was caked on so hard on places that even 100psi through small nozzle wouldn't shift it!  My fault for leaving the machine for so long without cleaning it, especially as I had an opportunity a year or so ago when I swapped the old hard drive over and added an SSD for the OS, user profiles and programmes.  I should have cleaned it then, as it was looking pretty dusty, but I was in a rush to get it working again so didn't bother (there's probably a moral in there somewhere...............).

[Onoff]

I found digging /lifting with a fine tool between the fins and vacuuming around the heatsink worked best.

 

I did take the back off the old 42" tv the other week and got the compressor and a brush on that. Amazing how much "sticks" and has to be helped with the brush.

[dpmiller]

Dragging paint PCs out from behind spray booths in bodyshops, I'm probably the winner in terms of pure dust. House dust OTOH can be a lot more greasy and fluffy in my experience.

[SteamyTea]

Just resurrecting this thread.

I have just heard about Brave as a browser.  It has TOR built in, and I have logged into a site I know my provider has blocked, so seems to work.

Couple of screenshots, one of the screen to activate TOR, and one of the memory usage.

Bit slow to upload stuff, but that is not unusual when using TOR.

 

Edited July 1, 2018 by SteamyTea