As in, doubts that I will be able to practically upgrade the memory in my Pentium. I thought I was being clever and got a batch of about six or seven 32Mb PC66 SDRAM chips, thinking that the law of averages would allow that most, if not all, of them would prove working and I’d be able to finally start using that machine without paging as a constant impediment.

But I am starting to scratch my head again, and that’s a bad sign. The machine refuses to acknowledge anything inserted into the memory expansion slot, and I can’t help but wonder what I’m doing wrong. I see no dip switches, no BIOS settings enabling the slot. I see no way of cueing the machine to notice that, hey, you’ve got a whole giant stick of memory in there.

After four or five sticks, and no signs of change, I think maybe I am beating a dead horse.

Which is not to suggest that the machine is unusable — far from it. But a day after I pass on a Pentium with 80Mb of memory in it, I wonder if perhaps that 560E was a suggestion from above. I don’t plan on ousting this Fujitsu any time soon (it’s in far too good a condition to surrender wantonly), but it does suggest that, to get a feel for the real speed of about 120Mhz, perhaps I should be thinking about another test subject.

Stay tuned. …