Curry Upgrade

No trip to Osaka is complete without a trip to Den Den Town, a.k.a. Nippombashi. This area is well known for its huge selection of discount electronics stores, DVD/game stores and anime porno stores. There's even a sprinkling of duty free shops for those people who come from countries where electronics are more expensive then here.

Tristan and I were hunting for upgrade parts to my notebook. My two and a half year old Dell Inspiron 8500 is still pretty good, but I'm getting tired of fighting the 40GB hard disk and fighting Windows for RAM which is being used by it and my security programs. Okay, so it can run a little slower than it should, at least I never get a virus. The original configuration also included 512MB of RAM.

After about an hour of shopping and price comparing, I picked up a 100GB drive and a 1GB RAM chip for about 300USD. The RAM is already inside and giving me a small performance boost, I expect to see more when I do the windows reinstall to go with the new drive.

Another interesting fact was the discovery of a small but hardcore Dell community who like to rip apart notebooks and upgrade them. My system is currently running a GeForce 4GO 4200 64MB vRAM card, but thanks to that community I will soon be installing an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo 128MB vRAM card. While not top of the line by today's standards, it's a considerable increase over the older card and show make Half Life 2 look more pretty!

After shopping, we finished the afternoon with a hardy lunch of Japanese style curry rice. Japanese curry is much more thick than your more traditional Indian curry and is usually accompanied by fried chicken or pork strips. Den Den Town also has the usually assortment of fast food stops, gydon restaurants and noodle shops. So why are you still reading this? Go!

Wisdom of the Day: Don't trust your preconceived notions.