Pentium 4 computer on wooden wheels

This morning, I was having a conversation with my sister via instant messaging using Pidgin (I wish Pidgin would have support for webcams). She was telling something about how slow her computer was and whether she could make some tweaks to make it faster.

She was a light computer user who uses it just for open office and a lot of Internet browsing. So I asked her to check the specs of her new computer.

After some blow by blow instructions on what she needs to do, I was able to find out that she had a Pentium 4 computer with 256 memory of RAM running Windows and a lot of free disk space.

So I told her the bad news that should can’t tweak Windows to make it faster — she would have to shell out some money to buy extra RAM. She asked me to explain why her computer was slow without the extra RAM.

For lack of a better analogy, I told her that the computer was actually fast enough like a sports car (not a Ferrari or Lamborghini but a sports car. ).

I said, “Your computer is a sports card. But because you only have 256MB of RAM with your sports car is that it’s using wooden wheels instead of using Michelin tires.”

She laughed and said, “I get it. I guess I’ll just have to replaced it with Michelin tires.”

I told her, “You can do with an additional 1GB of memory for your computer.”