I have a few new PCs in the house and was wondering what it would cost to upgrade them. As it turns out, not much.

Crucial.com normally charges a premium for its memory – a premium they well deserve for consistently delivering a great product with world-class service. So what’s the “premium” price for 2GB of RAM (two 1GB DDR2 modules), the kind that goes in top-of-the-line Dell machines today??

How does $79.99 sound?

Oh, and high-quality 500GB drives are just about ready to cross the $100 price point.

I better quit before I start sounding like Grandpa Simpson.

The weather widget says we’re into the 80s to stay here, with the possibility of crossing into the 90s by the end of this week. That’s a far cry from the 100+ temperatures that were par for the course in Scottsdale, but it’s still hot. And that’s especially bad news for PCs. Overheating can cause all sorts of problems, from unexplained crashes to premature parts failures, which is why I pass along this reminder every year at this time.

I’ve got a half-dozen computers in this office, and I try to pay close attention to fans, airflow, and the overall ambient temperature in the office. PCs that are in cramped quarters where they don’t get enough ventilation are especially vulnerable. I periodically clean dust and dust bunnies out of fans, too. This year, I’m using power management to keep computers idle, reducing heat and using less power, when I’m not using them.

Ever had any heat-related hardware failures? How hot is it in your part of the world right now, and what are you doing (or planning) to keep cool?

I’m not sure whether anyone told Dwight Silverman that it’s customary for a first-time author to buy drinks for all his fellow computer book authors when his first book is finally printed. (Co-author Larry Magid is exempt, of course, seeing as how this is not his first.) It’s going to be a big bar bill.

Everybody go over to Dwight’s place and congratulate him and Larry.

Over the weekend I did some housekeeping here, including a long-overdue upgrade to the underlying software that runs this site. The upgrade to WordPress 2.2 went smoothly. If you notice any problems, leave a comment or drop me an e-mail (ed-blog AT edbott DOT com).

Also, I’ve closed comments on every post before May 1 of this year, and my new comment policy will be to close comments within 30-60 days unless there’s a compelling reason to keep them open. Spam isn’t a problem anymore, thanks to some very good plug-ins for WordPress, but the work of maintaining old comment threads is nontrivial. I get good questions and feedback from the comments, but most of that comes when a post is fresh. After a month or two the noise ratio gets fairly high.

I realize from looking around this site that my e-mail address isn’t easy to find. I’m working on finding a way to encourage direct feedback without opening the floodgates for random comments.

After 24 hours of travel and eight time zones, I figure it’ll be a couple days before I’m ready to string together two coherent thoughts in a row.

So, enjoy the holiday weekend…

PS: If enough people are interested, I might post some photos and descriptions of our trip. If I do, I’ll put them on a separate page and post a link here.

So, we’re here in Lucca, in Northern Tuscany. The hotel we’re staying at, a lovely place, advertised that it offers free high-speed Internet access. Apparently someone forgot to explain to the staff how to make it work. (Update: And that “free” part? Gone, apparently.)

We checked in yesterday and I had a comical series of sessions with three different employees, last night, this morning, and this afternoon, all of whom tried their best and were unfailingly polite but couldn’t figure out the new system that was just installed in the past few weeks, replacing what had apparently been your basic router in the back office with free access to patrons.

It’s a pay-as-you-go system, at a fairly reasonable 1-euro-per-hour rate. I was able to get a nice strong connection, and I was able to brush up on my Italian by reading the many error pages and sign-up forms, none of which are in English. Eventually, I figured out what the hotel staff couldn’t, which is that I needed to walk a few blocks away, buy a prepaid Internet access card, and type the 16–digit serial number in the Ricaricati (recharge) page.

The larger lesson is that trying to turn Internet access into a paying business with lots of resellers has the unfortunate side effect of forcing some very nontechnical people into mastering (or not, as in this case) some arcane technologies, like encrypted wireless access points.

Apparently the Sofitel in Rome has wireless access. We’ll see whether it’s free or even available when we arrive there on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Lucca is a charming place, a fascinating old town in a walled city that is still in Tuscany but might as well be a million miles from the Siena-Cortona-Montepulciano region we’ve been in for the past week. Great food and wine, too.

Still on vacation. We’ve spent the last week in Central Italy, and we’re off to Lucca (northern Tuscany) for four nights tomorrow. We then go to Rome for a couple nights and fly home from there a week from today.

Regular posting will resume sometime after May 27. Meanwhile, if anyone has any questions about Italy, ask them in the comments.

Score one for editorial independence:

In a surprise reversal, IDG management removed Colin Crawford as PC World’s CEO and reinstated Harry McCracken as Editor in Chief…

An excellent outcome to an otherwise ugly story.

And props to my old PC Computing compadre Dylan Tweney, who is now editing the Epicenter blog at Wired News and doing a first-rate job of it. They’ve been out front on this story from Day One.