Issues of Upgrading memory on DELL Inspiron 640m

Recently my relative asked me to upgrade memory on his DELL Inspiron 640m notebook.
Gladly an offer of compatible RAM modules can be easily found on ebay.
The specs of compatible RAM are DDR2-667 PC2-5300 200 pins SODIMM and DDR2-533 PC2-4200 200 pins SODIMM (2x1Gb is maximum for Inspiron 640m).
Naturally I chose the fastest one.
New Kingstone modules came after 2 weeks of waiting, and THAT IS very reasonable time to deliver from Hong-Kong to Moscow, Russia.
It took time to plug in 2 modules, cause Module A is not so easily replaced as Module B. The dock of Modules B is situated under the bottom of the laptop. To reach Module A one should remove hinge cover and the keyboard (btw some samsung laptops have both modules under the keyboard).
The disappointment came after both modules were installed.
Memory speed showed as 533 both in Windows and in Bios setup.
After some googling (you see it's hard not to find needed info on the net today) the answer came out.
This laptop model is shipped with one of two processor types. The fastest one supports 667Mhz RAM and the other supports only 533Mhz. Pity that my relative had the second one.
So if you ever have to choose between compatible RAMs for your laptop first check if your CPU really supports desired RAM speed.

CB Compiler speed up and Total Commander as Horisontal Diff Tool

Today's post is about application of some tools.

First one is patching of Borland C++ Builder 6 with Andreas Hausladen's C++ Compiler Enhancements. Andreas has various patches and fixes for Borland, Codegear and Embarcadero products on his personal page. This particular one speeds up compilation of C++ projects by the direct call of the compiler with appropriate arguments. Original call to the compiler that the IDE makes for some reason takes much longer than the direct call to bcc32 from command line. Patching forces IDE to use the direct call. In addition this patch makes it easier to make use of precompiled headers, which can speed up compilation even further.
So it's definately recomended to install this patch.
Older versions (5 and 6) of BCB are not officially supporthed, though it's still possible to patch these IDEs. As I understand there's just no more guarantee that everything will go fine with BCB 5 and 6.
Btw another option to speed up compilation is to use RAM-disks, as suggests Kudzu. I have not tried it by myself, but hope to put my hands on it and cover results here.

Anoter useful applience is using of Total Commander to compare files in the horisontal split view.
When faced the need to compare two files with long lines, I started to search the web for diff tool that offered horisontal split. In fact I searched for some free tool. To my surprise according to Wiki there were only a few such tools. Namely:

• ExamDiff Pro (shareware)
• jEdit (java editor)
• Ediff (part of emacs)
• and... Total Commander (not free but an already licensed one)

It took only half a minute to find Comparison command in TC's menu, to select files and to switch to the horisontal view. Yet another appliance of the great file manager.