The first bit of doubt
Various Dell representatives have explained to me my problem as being one of how my graphics card uses hypermemory. However that doesn’t resolve the issue that I the option I selected when building my machine was for a card with 256MB dedicated video RAM – the fact that it could use hypermemory to extend that further was irrelevant.
For the avoidance of doubt I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the properties of the graphics card from the ATI administration utility. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but it sure looks like a 128MB graphics card to me, hypermemory or no hypermemory.
The other bit of doubt
As some of you may know, I do the odd bit of teaching and guest lecturing at a university in Dublin City (rearrange the words to figure out which one). There’s another member of staff there who, lucky person that he is, shares a variant of my name. By variant I mean that the name is phonetically and aurally identical but there are a few small differences.
- Dr. Darragh O’Brien uses his title (hard earned and well deserved) which is a title I don’t have (I’m just a pretender at this whole ‘knowing academic things’ it would seem).
- Dr. Darragh spells his name with 2 ‘r’s. I don’t.
- He uses an apostrophe in his surname (O‘Brien) where as I don’t)
This is important as Dell just emailed him and phoned him trying to get in contact with me. The waves of surrealism are lapping harshly on the shores of my patience at this stage. Thankfully Dr. D (as I will refer to him to avoid confusion) forwarded me the email he got which I’ve responded to. He’s used to it – the Admin team in the particular faculty had him listed to teach my class for a while on the on-line course tools.
I’m am heartily impressed that Dell went to the trouble of going to the university website and looking up contact details for me… I mean him… I mean me… …. drat, now even I’m confused. Particularly as they already had my personal email address in the email correspondence I’ve had and associated with my order and the support cases I’ve raised.
All of which made me decide to dig out an old slide I use in presentations on Information Quality that shows why I got interested in the issue in the first place.
Why i got into information quality
For those of you who can’t use the powerpoint viewer here, I’ve converted the slide to a gif for your viewing pleasure.
Dr. D — If you’re reading this thanks for the email forward and I hope you find my slide ‘amusing’.