Upgrades

On Saturday, we upgraded the memory in my 2008 iMac to four gigabites. By "we," I mean my husband did the actual work with the memory I'd purchased. The iMac only had one GB, so it was a bit limited.

The first step was, of course, to actually learn how to do this. Fortunately, there are You-Tube videos, such as this one, which my buddy and a fellow Mac-user Diane ("The Blue Ridge Gal") recommended. According the video, we could do this in under five minutes. we watched it a couple of times.

The second step was to clean off the desk (a major undertaking since my desk is always a mess) so we'd have room to flip the computer face down. That took me awhile—especially cleaning up all the cat hair.

Step three was to evict all resident cats. Some of them were not happy about this. After all, the study is their room, too. At least they think it is.

Step four was to shut down the iMac and disconnect all the peripherals. Below, you can see the iMac shutting down. I have some padding material waiting to protect the screen when we flip it.

Next step: Make sure the new memory was handy. The iMac has only two memory slots, so we were going to remove the one-gig memory from its slot and insert two two-gigs into each slot. 

In the background of the picture below, you will notice that a certain orange cat did not take well to being evicted. Meanwhile, my husband removed the old memory . . .

. . . and, using his Northern Freight LED mini-flashlight to guide him, he inserted the new memory in the slots. While he did this, I cleaned the keyboard and mouse.

After screwing the cover back over the slots and reconnecting all the cables, we turned the iMac on. The screen seemed to stay blue and empty for a long time, but finally it was OK.

I checked the "About this Mac" thingie. Yep—we now had 4 GB! 

It didn't take me long to realize the computer was working a lot faster. It also didn't take long until cats and clutter returned to the desktop.

The iMac's memory is only one thing I'm upgrading. I've ordered new cushions to upgrade the "This End Up" furniture in the den. I've signed up for an iPad workshop that meets tomorrow to upgrade my iPad skills.

I recently upgraded my personal camera from a little Kodak EasyShare to this Canon PowerShot SX150:

Consequently, I'm going to upgrade my camera skills by taking this workshop in a couple of weeks.

I need some health upgrades, too. Because I've been having problems keeping my blood sugar under control, I've made an appointment with a new doctor and I'm going to sign up for this class to (hopefully!) upgrade my diabetes management skills:

I figure all those upgrades should keep me busy.

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