yeah, the going price seems to be roughly $10/stick, meaning it would cost me $40 to buy a backup set and $80 for two. and then i need to pay shipping...

what am i willing to pay for 25 year old ram? about half that, max - but something close to $2/stick would be reasonable, and feasible to find if you search around enough.

i'm going to need to make a pawn shop rummage run for old ram when i can.

i don't need the ram enough to pay $100 for it...

but, i'll keep an eye out for it.

no sd ram for sale in windsor or ontario, for that matter...

this is a 1998 model board. i need to get it while i still can, because it wont boot at all when there's no more ram to kickstart it with. and, let that be written of these asus boards, as these macs and dell and hp laptops pile up in landfills - they last until you can't find any ram for them anymore.

that's impressive. truly.

so, i went to boot the reconstructed machine and...

nothing.

shit.

no beep codes? no pc speaker.

so, i had to build a new pc speaker out of electrical tape and a piece of cardboard (i exaggerate only slightly.) to get the beep codes to figure out why it wasn't booting. and, it was ram.

so, i stripped the thing right down and did a component-by-component test to realize that....everything works after all.

hrmmn.

so, did it just need a reseating? that's maybe an oversimplification. reseating it on it's own didn't help. rather, it seemed like once i triggered the circuit with a 65 mb chip that the 256 mb chips started flowing, too - meaning it's more like i had to warm it up than that i had to reseat it.

the machine is currently sitting at the bios screen with just a video card and hard drive, in addition to the maxxed out 1 gb of ram. so, it works. hooray. 

and, it's quiet - which i don't even understand. it should be as loud as it ever was. but, i'll take it.

i need to check kijiji for 256 mb pc100 sd ram. that's the most the device can take, and a little back up will definitely help.

it's otherwise nice to get things back and running again, even if everything around me remains in disarray.