My current x86 computer originally had 512 MB of RAM and has a hard-disk dedicated to Windows 98. However, recently I've been running Linux exclusively on it, and also added another 2 GB of RAM. Today, my father needed to access his old email, and so we needed to boot from Windows. I arranged a grub boot configuration for it and booted it. I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.20-rc5 so it came at the right time. Windows came up the logo was displayed, but eventually a text message like "Insufficient memory to run Windows" was displayed.

I tried to eliminate some problem - I cleared some space out of drive D (normally used for data), set the BIOS to boot the Windows disk, and tried again. Same problem. After discussing it with a friend and googling a bit, I found this page that says that win98 will "freak" if there is more than 2 GB of memory.

If Windows 98 cannot handle more than 2 GB of memory that's fine, but why does it have to freak with an incorrect error message. Can't it utilise only a subset of this memory? Well, I guess that if we'd like to run Windows on this machine again, we'll need to upgrade to Windows XP or whatever. Oh well.

So I went with Ofer to buy more memory on Monday. As it turned out I was a bit distracted and for the first time he had to park his car and wait for me a little. We drove to the store, and bought the memory units there - 2 of 1 GB. I asked for a receipt and got it. Then when I said my name, someone overheard me, and it turned out he knew me from the Israeli FOSS Internet, and from Haifux. We chatted a bit and then parted.

During the evening, I tried to install the memory modules myself, but it didn't work at first, so my father helped me and we were successful. 2.5 GB RAM in total, excluding the 1 GB swap, out of 4 GB, which is the board's maximal amount of RAM. Now, everything feels more snappy - it takes less than a minute to start a new konsole window or a gvim window, and I can probably run some Java applications without making my system completely unresponsive.

On a slightly different note, I went to the records' store in the Ramat Aviv Mall, and bought the CD "Explosive - the best of bond". It's pretty good.

I have a long weekend ahead of me due to Tish'ah Be'Av and one thing I'm planning to do is blogging. The first thing I'd like to blog about is my hardware wishlist.

First is memory. At the moment I have 512 MB, but with KDE, two Apache's, SpamAssassin, akregator, Amarok, and Firefox, it is no longer enough. So I'd like to upgrade it to 2 GB (or 2.something GB, witht the old memory units). A friend of mine is going to drive me to a hardware store in downtown Tel Aviv, and we're going to buy them there then. My board supports up to 4 GB of memory.

Next on my list is a flat screen. My screen at the moment is a 17"" MAG screen, that occupies too much space and plus has a large frame, which makes the image smaller. I'd like a nice 19" flat screen. This things don't cost too much, and at least I could put more stuff on my desktop without straining my eyes.

Another thing I'd like is a new hard disk. At the moment, I have two 80 GB hard disks, both of them quite full. With the new disk we can put all the largish video and audio files we have. I still don't know whether I'm going to get a SATA disk or an external USB disk.

Finally - the video card. At the moment, I have an Hang-vidia card, which I run without the 3-D drivers (so at least my computer will be stable). I'd like a card with some free-as-in-GPL 3-D drivers. I know that Intel cards have just that, but I'd like to see what will happen with the AMD and ATI merger, and whether it will cause the ATI proprietary drivers to be open-sourced too. In the meantime - no 3-D games for me on my Linux machine, but I still mostly only play PySol and some random puzzle games.

Oh and if you're going to tell me that the Nvidia drivers version 6666 or whatever works for you, and that I should use it - forget it. I have better things to do than to play with different versions of a huge and quirky binary blob. I want it free-as-in-speech and problem-free!

(For the record, I am making use of some high-quality binary-only software on my Linux machine (much less on my family's Windows' machine). But I think that binary kernel drivers are Evil, and do not wish to use them. Plus, I never depend on such software.)