Horrible RDRAM Price

I was in the process of fixing my teacher's computer, and found one more reason to NOT buying IBM product: they frequently use technologies that are propritory and horrible expansive. In fact, my trip to my teacher's place was solely for finding information, and planning to upgrade her computer with more memory. The conclusion, however, was that it's not worth the price.

Her computer is a IBM NetVista 6832 series. By checking a memory manufactor web site, I found out that her machine, which is in A60 series, is using PC800 RDRAM. There are ECC and non-ECC memory for RDRAM, and unfortunately I don't have much idea about which one is better. But I found out from this page that I can mix memory without serious problem. So with all the information on hand and a gaint bitmap to bring with me with I shop, I headed to the Hong Kong hardware web site, only to found out that the price for a 256Mb RDRAM is HK$645. When I buy in pair, we are talking about HK$1290 for one pair of memory worth of 512Mb in size. Consider that 512Mb PC400 DDR Ram only cost HK$330, the HK$1290 price is simply unacceptable. So as the conclusion we decided not to upgrade the machine.

I also found out that the stupid machine has 4 slots, with one pair of 64Mb memory and one pair of slot holder. The stupid thing is that you CANNOT remove the slot holder without putting back a pair of memory to occupy that space. How dumb the idea is!