Computer Memory

If your laptop or desktop PC starts up fine and works ok, to begin with, but gradually as the hour's pass, its performance worsens, then you could be experiencing RAM issues. If this is the case, just a few short hours after it seemed to be operating ok, websites will start to take an age to load and open programs either crash or freeze seemingly indefinitely.

This type of slow, but noticeable deterioration in performance is indicative of a RAM issue and being able to spot the symptoms early, could give you the time you need to arrange replacement hardware without disrupting your computer use too much.

So, let’s take a look at some of the other symptoms to watch out for:

Sporadic Rebooting
If your computer restarts without warning, right when you were in the middle of working, this is an indicator of a fault with your RAM. You’ll likely not forget this is happening to you, as every time it does, you will lose everything you haven’t actively saved.

Programs Freezing
When using any programs on your computer, you could experience unexplained freezing for minutes at a time, which could be attributed to poorly performing RAM. This could result in programs crashing, timing out or leaving areas of blank space where text should be - another indicator that your RAM is struggling.

Corrupted Files
When your RAM begins to malfunction, programs that you use on a regular basis, might become corrupted for absolutely no reason. If this happens even just a few times, there is a strong possibility that your memory is the culprit.

The Dreaded Blue Screen
Blue screen errors can be extremely frustrating, especially when you lose unsaved work as a result, but this can also be symptomatic of badly performing memory. This is important to remember, as you often don’t get the time to read the error messages displayed before they disappear.

Take Action
If this is happening to your laptop or desktop PC, the tendency is to keep muddling along for as long as possible before taking action to resolve the problem. The fact is, this type of problem will only get worse until you are unable to even to boot your machine. So, if this is the case, acknowledging the issue and replacing the offending hardware could save you an awful lot of stress and aggravation.

Sun Microsystems was a huge American company primarily concerned with retailing computers, components for computers and associated IT services. It is arguably most notable for the creation of Java programming code, the platform upon which so many computer and smartphone games rely.

The company, founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andy bechtolsheim was also responsible for the invention of the ZFS Network File System, the Solaris operating system and Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC).

Sun was also instrumental in the development of a number of technologies in the world of computing, amongst which are ‘thin client computing’, MySQL, virtualized computing, RISC processors, and Unix. At its very zenith, the headquarters of Sun Microsystems occupied a large section of Silicon Valley in California.

Before the Dot.com Bubble
In the 90s, it was all plain sailing and expansion for the company, as it made a great deal of money and its stock soared on the money markets. This led to increased investment and a swelling of their employee numbers, but this expansion was built on less than steady ground. They were unaware of it at the time, but only part of the boom was based on genuine demand.

Unfortunately, a good portion of the boom rested on the paradigm of web startup enterprises (.com businesses) and depended on revenue that would ultimately never materialise. At the beginning of the year 2000, the aforementioned bubble burst and its stock, sales and profit levels dropped through the floor. By 2001, the stock price had dropped to pre-boom levels and it showed little sign of recovery.

Factory Closures
Going into 2002, their share price sat at just a 10th of its former levels, at just $10 per share. Despite a brief rally, with the share price increasing to around $20 per share, Sun was forced to shut it’s Newark manufacturing plant and consolidate everything to its Oregon site.

Even though Sun’s shares were sitting at just a fifth of their former value, the company was still a multi-billion dollar enterprise and this was illustrated when it was purchased by the Oracle Corporation in April 2009 for a princely sum of $7.4bn.

This effectively brought down the curtain on Sun Microsystems, but the company will be forever remembered in the pantheon of IT history, as an innovator and a major contributor to the development of computing hardware.

Sun was also a significant player in open source software, as well as ‘open’ systems like Unix, which is a multi client OS designed to be adaptable and flexible. Developed in the 1970s, Unix represented the first ‘C’ operating language.