Lord Lucan returns

Firstly apologies for my lengthly absence.  I've had a bunch of personal issues to deal with, and blogging hasn't been at the top of my agenda. In fact, it's been fairly near the bottom.  But I'm back now.

So the last couple of days I've been messing around with an old-ish Toshiba Satellite L300 laptop. It's a 2008 model, which I bought in 2009 on end-of-line clearance. Not a bad machine, dual-core AMD Turion 64-bit CPU, 3GB RAM and nVidia mobile graphics (this was before AMD bought out ATI, nowadays you never get nVidia and AMD together unless you build it yourself).

Originally this laptop came with Vista *spit*. I'd been running it with Windows XP, obviously. Anyway, the time came to retire XP. I took the opportunity to upgrade the hard drive (was 160GB, now 500GB) and put more memory in it. You can never have too much RAM, right?

Wrong.

The laptop as built had 3GB RAM fitted. This consisted of a 2GB and a 1GB module. As any techie knows, a 32-bit OS can only address 4GB of RAM, and by the time you've taken out address space for IO and VRAM you're left with 3-point-something GB. No problem, I'll install 64-bit Windows 7 on it.

Except... the system was totally unstable with 4GB RAM. I replaced the 1GB with another 2GB and installed Win7 x64 on a new 500GB hard disk. It worked. For a while. Then it bluescreened. And kept bluescreening.

Eventually I got it to work sort-of by turning off AHCI in the BIOS, and running the hard disk in compatibility mode. Then it would only crash every 3rd time it was booted up.

Thinking there was a timing error with the RAM, I swapped some SODIMMs around with other laptops and made sure that I had a matched pair of 2GB modules installed. Same result. Ok, it's not a timing error then.

I'd already updated the BIOS, so that's not an option.

Eventually I put the two original SODIMMs back in and reverted to 3GB RAM. It worked perfectly. But the lower RAM meant it was slow on 64-bit Windows.

So I finally gave up, started from scratch, and this time installed the 32-bit version of Windows 7. Result - a machine that works perfectly.

And the moral of this story (if there is one?) is that sometimes older hardware works better in 32-bit mode. Remember, you only need 64-bit windows if you've got 4GB or more of RAM. And you only need 4GB or more of RAM if you're running 64-bit Windows.

In other news I've bought myself a cheap tablet. It's an Asus MemoPad 7". £60 at Tesco (on clearance). It does what I want, which is to test out the mobile/tablet versions of web sites that I'm creating. But I have a problem with one app. Snapchat. When I want to send a text chat message to someone in Snapchat, I can't. The Android command bar (the one with Back, Home and Switch App on it) is displayed across the chat text field  So I can't tap in the text entry field to write a message. Any suggestions?

And now Snapchat has stopped working on Bluestacks too.

Such is life.