A few weeks ago, I was having issues with my desktop. I did the proper troubleshooting and eventually determined which RAM module was the dead one. I really didn’t want to go out and buy another one, this computer isn’t even two years old yet. I no longer had the piece of paper with the warranty on it, but it turns out Kingston HyperX RAM is covered by a ‘product lifetime warranty’. Cool, I had nothing to lose, except maybe the cost of a small padded envelope (70p).

I filled out a support request, with a description of the problem. I wrote something along the lines of “the module is borked - please fix.”

The same day I received two emails, one acknowledging the reuqest, and another saying that it had been passed on to the returns team.

Three days later, I received an email saying they’d authorised the replacement. They gave me a number, and a shipping label. I printed off the label and cycled round to the post office on my way back from the campus to send back the defective module.

Then, I waited… 16 days, with no communication. I was starting to give up hope, maybe I didn’t write the number clearly enough? Maybe it got sent to the wrong address?

Then, yesterday evening, there was an unexpected package waiting for me in the post room.

It arrived! I opened up my computer and put it in.

It boots fine, and the new memory shows up in the BIOS.

And in the system monitor.

It’s normal for the system to show less than 8GB, as around 1GB is allocated to the integrated GPU.

So now I can return to my previous lazy memory-intensive behaviour - leaving stacks of documents open on my second monitor, opening too many tabs in my browser… but if anything, living with only 4GB of memory wasn’t too difficult. I tended to hover around 3GB anyway, and so long as you’re conscious of how much stuff you have running, you can work within the limit.

Also, full credit to Kingston for their customer support. Next time I need to buy some furious RAM, I’ll remember this experience.

There is another computer problem, which has resulted in me being miraculously more productive. When I updated Ubuntu Mate on my desktop, the new version of Atril (1.20.2) comes with a bug which means it can’t read .cbr comic book archives.

The bug is listed in the Fedora bug tracker, and mentioned in the Ubuntu Mate forum, and there’s also a bug report on launchpad.

It’s been fixed in the latest release of Atril (1.21.1) and I’m just waiting for the update to filter through to my computer. In the meantime I’m relying on mcomix, which works well, but in practice I’ve sort of given up reading comics for the moment.