For the last.. oh.. say.. 4 months (probably more), my laptop has been predictably crashing everything. This has been a big issue. I couldn't run things for too long and often the only way to fix things was to restart.

If Firefox died, running firefox again would give it an immediate crash before it even got a chance to do anything. It was like there was some sort of 'residual' memory left over that it was going to re-load firefox in to. Very strange.

Worse was the Smalltalk VM. Smalltalks have very advanced memory allocators - for that reason, they have some of the fast memory management and garbage collection going around. But, they exercise the memory in ways most applications don't. The more active a program, the more likely it was to trigger a problem with my laptop's memory. Now, as you can imagine - Bottom Feeder is quite an active program.

Bottom Feeder actively fetches lots of information from the web - more than your regular web browser would. Then it processes it and presents it actively to the user for reading. Very neat technology. So, in my computers bad state, I could run Bottom Feeder in the following manner: "Start BF, update, read very quickly, close and save" .. any longer and it would die on me.

Finally I'd had enough. The reason I was having trouble was because of the new RAM that was added to my laptop conflicting with the old RAM. I had a 256mb chip in there and a new 512mb chip in there. I bit the bullet and had the old 256mb removed. Suddenly my world had changed!

I literally haven't quit BottomFeeder for 4 days straight now. It's bliss. To have all these feeds coming to me constantly, not having to " be careful " when using Firefox, not having to shut all apps down before suspending to disk.

Heck, I was even getting impossible assert failures in the VisualWorks' VM because of my bad memory problems. All solved - simply by removing the old ram. I'm a happy chappy right now. Now I'll have confidence in using my laptop at Smalltalk Solutions.