My precious laptop. I use it for everything. Watching Netflix, attending school, talking with my friends, playing video games, etc. Unfortunately, my laptop is more hare than tortoise. Which means that it works in bursts and goes to sleep most of the time. I investigated this situation to figure out what the cause might be. After a bit of googling and watching youtube videos on my slow laptop, I opened the task manager which showed how much load there was on the CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network. So many applications require a lot of resources but, the computer slowed down when the memory was full. Thus I had found the culprit: I had only 4 GB RAM and the applications I was running needed a lot more.


I did a bit more research on the manufacturer’s website to determine how much and what type of memory I could put in my laptop. I purchased a 16 GB module. I carefully opened up my laptop, unsnapped the memory module cover, removed the original memory, replaced it with the new memory, put the memory module cover back on, and clicked it shut, finally closing the laptop cover. Now my laptop has the best qualities of the hare and the tortoise.

I have always treated every electronic item as a black box. This was the first time I opened up something and looked under the cover and realized how much electronics there is, how complicated it all looked, and how wonderful it is that everything just works. Just because something isn’t working, doesn’t mean that we need to replace it completely. If we can Identify what is not working, It may be that we have a very small problem to solve.

Such a simple upgrade solved my laptop performance problem. This got me thinking about other problems like poverty, malnourishment, lack of education, pollution, fraud, dirty politics, racism, intolerance, and terrorism. I wish there was a simple upgrade that would solve these problems.