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Days lost to a faulty SODIM socket and Vista...

It's a pretty good rule: if you have a difficult chore to get done, hire a professional to do it, and spend the time saved earning money to pay that pro. So what on earth was I thinking of when I decided to upgrade my Tablet?

Answer: well, it's sort of a good idea for a tech journalist to have some vague notion of what's going on inside the stuff he uses and writes about. And after all, how hard can it be to put RAM into a notebook PC?

The PC is a lovely little notebook - the Compaq tc4200 - which just happens to be a Tablet. And the new Windows Vista runs beautifully on a Tablet, so since I have an article due on Tablets and Vista, the obvious thing to do was to install the final release version of the operating system. Which I did. And (exactly as predicted) found that honestly, a 512 megabyte machine really didn't have the oomph to run Vista.

In these circumstances, Crucial is your friend. You run their little utility and it tells you what modules to get, and they send them to you. You plug them in.

Two SODIM packets duly arrived. I opened up the tc4200 and found one empty SODIM socket underneath. And it was empty. Where's the other one? Under the keyboard! Is it easy to remove to keyboard? Is the Pope a Buddhist? Do bears use toilet paper?

As a test, I plugged one SODIM into the empty socket. It's supposed to work, even so, but not at all to my surprise, it didn't work. The machine didn't even beep. It spun its fan, and sulked. There were no error messages. Nothing.

This is the moment to draw a veil over HP's atrocious search facility for its support web site. It says: "You searched for: 'tc4200 upgrade ram'. Showing 1 - 10 of 15685 results found, top 500 sorted by score." Save yourself the effort and take it from me: NONE of those results includes tc4200. I forced tc4200 - and the results had no mention of RAM or upgrade.

So it's out with the jewellery screwdriver set, and the magnifying glass and the clean table and the bright angle-poise lamp and - an hour or so later, I've pulled off the underneath (13 screws, all different lengths) and removed the screen clamp, and lifted the keyboard, and pulled off the trackpoint mouse controller cable, and pulled out the old SODIM and put in one of the new ones, and replaced the keyboard, and pulled it off because the mouse controller cable came undone (four times!) and put it back on, and screwed all the screws back into the right sockets (labelled!) and replaced the screen clamp and put the battery back in and switched on. And it works! It says "new memory size 1G?" and I confirm, and Vista is going.

Then there's just the easy bit; put the second 1G SODIM into the empty socket underneath.

The machine dies.

That's most of the next day, trying to get it to work. Replace the working SODIM with the one that appears to be dud, just to be sure: nope. It works fine, whichever SODIM I use. Either of the 1G modules, or the old halfG module; if I plug it into the main socket under the keyboard, they all work.

Add any of them to the empty socket underneath, they all kill the PC.

Next step; to ask Hewlett-Packard if this is a problem they see as their problem. I may be some time...