Since my laptop is an ancient clay tablet that can barely run Emacs and a couple of other things without everything crashing, I’ve had to use a lab workstation with about 128 GB RAM and a fairly new Intel processor for running some of my analyses. It’s phenomenally fast for a computer that runs Windows and gets most things done easily. It’s only when I run something that’s something memory intensive when things really start to get muddled up. I could just be incredibly bad at R programming but boy, it hit 105 GB of the RAM and slowed the hell down. It’s been like this since last night and now there’s nothing I can do but wait. Surely a Linux or FreeBSD system would have had lower core functioning thresholds for all of this.

Another fairly weird detail was that it was set to use a UK keyboard layout unlike almost any PC that’s made in these parts. It was so easy to change but almost no-one had it figured until I got here.

~~~