That makes four weeks in a row -_- that I’ve headed to Akihabara. I’ve always called myself the Shibuya type, but at this rate everyone would believe me if I said I was the Akiba type. -_-;; (But I really am the Shibuya type~) Honestly I could just save it all up and go once, but the errands keep cropping up one at a time. Three weeks ago I went for cables, two weeks ago for a sound card with optical output, last week there was a Pentax SLR exhibition, and today I went to buy memory, which has crashed in price lately.
I’d been pretty much out of the loop on computer news for a while, but a few days ago a friend happened to mention that RAM is now less than half what it cost this time last year. I thought no way and checked Kakaku.com, and it had actually dropped by more than half. -_-;; It’s down to about 30%.. Wow.. I feel like bowing to Samsung Electronics ^_^ Four weeks in a row felt a bit much, so I thought about waiting a little and going once I had something else to buy, but Akiba is close (about 20 minutes away), and since I added an extra monitor recently and started working with a bunch more browser windows open, I’ve been badly short on memory, so I decided to go and buy it right away.
As always, the first thing to do on arrival is fill my stomach. I head to Koumen, a fairly well-known chain in the gourmet court on the 8th floor of Yodobashi. They have branches all over the city, so there’s really no reason to eat there in Akihabara specifically, but I went anyway on the principle that I should try every place in Akihabara worth visiting.
The 990-yen jukusei-men (aged noodles) with the everything topping
This is how much topping you get. The portion is average, but the chashu is really good. The rest is above par too.
Jukusei-men
It’s shoyu-based. Light yet with a clean finish, so I was very happy with the taste. The noodles were cooked just right, too. That said, it does feel a bit pricey. Order one 1,000-yen bowl and it’s about snack-sized (surely it’s not just me?). An extra serving of noodles costs extra.
When I came out after eating to go buy memory, the eight-lane road was closed to traffic because it was Sunday. It’s a pedestrian paradise (hokosha tengoku) event. In Tokyo they do it in Shinjuku, Ginza and Akihabara on Sundays and holidays. On days like this you see promotional events and cosplayers all over the street.
Suzumiya Haruhi, of course. The big thing in anime lately.
This is how packed it is.
Make sure you come on a Sunday.. there’s lots to see.
A gravure idol, I think..
I took the photo without knowing her name. It seems unlikely, but if she gets famous later maybe I’ll find out who she is.
I went round several of Akiba’s parts shops and bought 1 GB of memory for my laptop and a 4 GB SDHC card for Vista ReadyBoost. My laptop is a Panasonic Let’s note R6, and until last year its dedicated 1 GB memory module cost about 20,000 yen. I got it for 5,780 yen at the cheapest shop in Akiba. The lowest price on Kakaku.com was about 6,900 yen, so Akihabara really is something. It always seems to pay back my round-trip train fare. The 4 GB SDHC was rated 150x and only cost 2,200 yen, so I grabbed it thinking what a steal, but when I tested it at home it wasn’t fast enough for ReadyBoost -_-;; I decided to swap it with the 60x card I’d been using in my digital camera.
With ReadyBoost set up and more memory, I can definitely feel the performance boost. Once I put in a bigger hard drive, I think the R6 upgrades will be done. Older Panasonic laptops used proprietary drives and were hard to upgrade, but the R6 takes a standard SATA HDD, so you just open it up and swap it. Right now 160 GB is the best-selling laptop drive size, and 250 GB still isn’t that cheap (unlike memory, I didn’t see anywhere selling them below the Kakaku.com lowest price). I’m thinking of waiting until 320 GB drops to the low 10,000-yen range. With around 320 GB I should be able to get by even with about 150 GB of MP3s on it.
Mission accomplished in Akihabara, I head to Shinjuku. The Shinjuku story continues in the next post.