AlexHopmann.com

I bought an extra 2GB for the “media center” box that I’m using as a workstation at the moment. With the quad-core CPU there is plenty of horsepower for running virtual machines which are useful for all sorts of development purposes. But RAM quickly becomes a limiting factor and I wanted more than my existing 2GB.

So I order a pair of high quality RAM from NewEgg, put them in the other two slots and.. Nothing. The machine won’t POST. The power light comes on, but nothing- no beep, no video, nothing diagnostic that I can see to help figure it out.

Ok, maybe the new RAM is bad. I pull it out, pull the old ones out and put the new ones in by themselves. Works fine. Hmmm. I tried a BIOS upgrade and several other things but so far no luck.

The only hint I can find online is that I might want to try increasing the voltages to the RAM. Since I don’t know what “normal” is this scares me a bit to be honest. Any other thoughts? Each pair works on its own, each is a matched pair, PC6400 (800mhz DDR2), in the appropriate sockets. Similar timings on both sets although they aren’t from the same manufacturer.

Fil posts about a cool library he made called Sistr that lets you use Silverlight to render high quality fonts. This is a good example of the power of Silverlight (since it really enables you to use markup for stuff in your normal HTML page way). But its also unfortunately the kind of thing that isn’t going to be adopted much until Silverlight gets deployed more widely. I suspect no one wants to force people to do a download just for somewhat better visuals.

Which brings up an interesting feature suggestion (which might already be there). If Sistr made it really easy to fall back to the standard HTML rendering (or a PNG file) when Silverlight is not installed rather than pushing the Silverlight install, this could be easier to adopt. Since it supports the same HTML markup already, that should be fairly straightforward, although the rendering can be so different that designers might not like that approach.

Or another approach would be a web-service that creates the PNG server-side for users that don’t have Silverlight. Cache it so you don’t re-render on every request, but make the developer story just as easy as putting markup in a page (as easy as the existing Sistr).