Increasing My Memory

You're probably hoping that I've found a way to increase my personal memory. Sorry.

But I did have to find a solution to the memory crunch on my laptop. It's a several-year old ThinkPad T30 with a 20 Gbyte Hard Drive. And it was down to only a little over 1 Gbyte of free space. Needless to say, it wasn't running very well.

So I ended up picking up a WD Passport portable hard drive with 40 Gbytes of storage that plugs into a USB port. And then I had to buy a PCMCIA USB 2.o card so that I could get the higher transfer rate, because the ThinkPad is old enough to only have USB 1.1 (40 times slower than USB 2.0). And of course, I bought one of the cheaper cards and then had to return it and get an expensive one that would actually work with the WD.

After I moved some stuff to the WD Passport, I decided to defragment the hard drive. Guess it hadn't been done before, because nearly all of the files on the drive were fragmented. Needless to say, it had to run nearly all night to get the job done, but the result was more free space. So now the machine runs a lot better.

Just relating all of this to let others know that there are solutions other than buying a new machine. And that cleaning up the hard drive occasionally is a good idea.

Now if there were just something as straightforward that I could do about my brain...