Tag Archives: Toshiba

Says 50 – USA Military and Homeland Security consider 2GB RAM for notebooks as “dual use” and sales need to be registered.

Posted on by
Reply

2012 May 09 I thought that if the increase in RAM helped my netbook, why not update my old Toshiba. I did a search and found that my old 2007 Toshiba Satellite A100 TA6 can be upgraded to 4GB of RAM. Originally it came with 1GB, but a couple of years after I got it I upgraded to 2GB, as that was as large a RAM I could get at that time. With this upgrade and my previous hard drive upgrade, I’ll now have a 2007 dual core laptop with 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive that is comparable to present laptops. The only difference is that I’m still running Windows XP (SP2).
I called Staples, but they didn’t have any 2GB PC2-4200 200-PIN DDR2 533MHz SO-DIMM RAM so I went on-line and found a company in the USA called Pro Memory upgrade that had what I needed so I placed my order for 2 sticks of RAM.

The next day I got an email asking me to fill out a form with the title…. “The U.S. Department of Commerce requires adherence to the following guidelines when exporting goods from the United States.” Apparently, a stick of 2GB Ram falls under military use “dual use” and so it has to be registered with numerous USA government agencies, including HomeLand Security. I just wanted to upgrade my laptop, not get involved with any military operation or be subject to military scrutiny and whatever other paranoid operations these military based agencies have. Anyway, I wrote an email back, politely telling them to cancel my order, as I don’t need the RAM that badly.

The irony and utter stupidity of all this is that 95% of all RAM and Hard Drive memory are either made in Thailand or China. Yet these idiotic bureaucrats and military robots focus to maintain control on products specifically designed for public use. Dah!

Says 49 – TuneUp Utilities and upgrade to 2GB RAM for Netbook

Posted on by
Reply

2012 May 04 A couple of days ago I download a trail version of TuneUp Utilities and I was really impressed with how it cleaned up and sped up my Windows operating system on both my Toshiba laptop and my Toshiba Netbook. TuneUp Utilities also monitors and maintains the Windows operating system, and the nice feature is that if you think that it make a mistake, you can easily undo what was done, not like some programs I’ve tried that screwed up the registry to the point where even a system restore couldn’t fix the problems it created.

Another great feature is that it temporarily disables any programs that are running in the background, but that aren’t needed…. including bloatware in Windows 7. That feature is a big part of what makes the computer run faster. It really doesn’t interfere as when you want that program, like MS-Word, it automatically activates it and monitors it and when it is idle for 10 minutes, it disables it without you losing any data. Otherwise, even though you haven’t opened the software, it is running in the background and taking up RAM space that leaves less for other programs to use.

One recommendation the program had for my Netbook was to increase the size of the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. Later I went to Staples Business Depot and bought a 2GB RAM that they just happened to have on sale for $24.95. I went home and installed the RAM and now between the TuneUp Utilities and the 2GB RAM, my netbook that was a snail, is now a speedy rabbit. It used to take about 6-8 minutes to boot up and it would often “hang” when I was using it. Now it fully boots in around 2 ½ minutes and it doesn’t hang like it used to, and it’s a lot faster now, even when I open multiple programs.