How much RAM do you have ?

G

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I just <A HREF="http://forumz.tomshardware.com/community/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=37446#37446" target="_new"> posted a poll </A>to see how much ram you people have in your (recent) computers.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 

c0d1f1ed

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Uhm, there's something strange about the poll...

I have a Celeron 1200 so I should have marked the last option, but I have 512 MB so I marked that. Why would I "need an upgrade anyway"? I use my system mostly for programming, and I need the RAM for all the memory heavy development tools, that run smooth nonetheless.
 

Ncogneto

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<A HREF="http://www.lostcircuits.com/memory/2gb/" target="_new">http://www.lostcircuits.com/memory/2gb/</A>

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!
 
G

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Yeah I saw that.. weird. either firingsquad f*cked up big time, or it is extremely dependant on the applications ? Too bad lostcircuit didnt retest with some of the same apps that firingsquad used, now I'm still not sure what to think. Did FS have a crappy MB ? Is the performance hit real but limited to just those (kind of) apps that FS used ?

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 

slvr_phoenix

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Uhm, there's something strange about the poll...

I have a Celeron 1200 so I should have marked the last option, but I have 512 MB so I marked that. Why would I "need an upgrade anyway"? I use my system mostly for programming, and I need the RAM for all the memory heavy development tools, that run smooth nonetheless.
I have to completely agree. I'm running a 750MHz P3 with 256MB of RAM at work. I'd <i>like</i> to upgrade that, but I'm not allowed to because my rig has to be the same as those that we ship to our customers. Still, I can run all sorts of software development tools and even use Cygwin to emulate Linux enough to run PostGRE SQL for running the database that my company's latest software uses at the same time that I develop that software. Yeah I hit ye olde virtual memory a lot, but it still all runs just fine. There's absolutely no "need" for an upgrade.

Further I consider that poll invalid for one simple reason: Many of us have more than one PC that we regularly use. I bounce between two at work (with a third DEC Alpha under my desk that hardly ever gets used) and another two at home. (I have my primary home PC that I game on and do intensive work on and then I have the laptop that I write novels on while in bed.) So right there I have four PCs that I typically use on a regular basis. I put my best system into the poll, but the truth is that most days I sit at that machine for far less time than the other three.

<A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20031017" target="_new">Then what's your poison of choice?
Soymilk. I was raised on the stuff.
Ah. What's it made of?
Soy.
Is that soy as in soylent green?</A>
 

ChipDeath

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my rig has to be the same as those that we ship to our customers.
I wish I was in that situation... My work machine is a PII400 w/ 292Mb of RAM (of which 128Mb is part of my personal stash), and the last new system we shipped to a customer was a P4C2.6 w/ 512Mb of RAM :eek: .. It's depressing running the software I write on something so much faster than the PC it was developed on..
Seeing stuff that I'm used to waiting 30 seconds for, taking less than 5 seconds... :frown:

---
<font color=red>The preceding text is assembled from information stored in an unreliable organic storage medium. As such it may be innacurate, incomplete, or completely wrong</font color=red> :wink:
 

slvr_phoenix

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I wish I was in that situation... My work machine is a PII400 w/ 292Mb of RAM (of which 128Mb is part of my personal stash), and the last new system we shipped to a customer was a P4C2.6 w/ 512Mb of RAM.. It's depressing running the software I write on something so much faster than the PC it was developed on..
Seeing stuff that I'm used to waiting 30 seconds for, taking less than 5 seconds...
Actually I'm in a similar quandry myself. :( Some of the systems that we're shipping are like I said, and with a whopping Matrox G400 graphics card and a slow CD burner.

However other systems that we're shipping now are 2.8GHz P4Bs with 1GB DDR333 on an 845 mobo with GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics cards and an HP 200i DVD burner! Yet I have to match our 'worst case customers', not our best.

And actually it kind of pisses me off too because my system is a P3 750 on a VIA mobo while our 'worst case customers' are getting P3 800s on a 440BX! Oh how I'd like that added stability <i>and</i> performance boost. :(

Plus I had to buy my own audio card because my PC didn't have any onboard audio. :\ I want my MP3s dammit! Heh heh.

Maybe I'll get lucky sooner or later though. My power supply's 12V line will every so often just dive for no reason and cause my system to crash. Normally that'd be a bad thing, but if it starts to happen more frequently then maybe I can finally win my argument to get my system replaced.

What I really need is a laptop though. You've no idea how much of a pain in the arse it is to lug my computer around from room to room (and up and down stairs at that) whenever I need to hook up to hardware in the labs in order to debug my software. :\ This whole 'matching our customer' thing really bites.

<A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20031017" target="_new">Then what's your poison of choice?
Soymilk. I was raised on the stuff.
Ah. What's it made of?
Soy.
Is that soy as in soylent green?</A>
 

ChipDeath

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This whole 'matching our customer' thing really bites.
Well... The way I try to look at it (to stop me constantly bitching about my work rig :wink: ) is that at least it encourages me to optimise my software more :smile: ..

I've written stuff which I would have been happy with on a 2Ghz+ machine, but because I was having to wait <i>ages</i> I ended up at least doubling the speed with a few little tweak ideas, which I'd possibly never have thought of otherwise, as there'd be no incentive.

[Never gonna happen]
I reckon all the game programmers should be forced into writing software on stuff that's like 60% of the best hardware at the time of release.. at least it would encourage them to not be overly reliant on users having decent hardware...
[/never gonna happen]

I always think back to when I had a spectrum, and the amount of stuff they used to be able to cram into 48K is unbelieveable really. Yet now a completely blank Excel spreadsheet is 14K in size? Why? What the hell do they need all the space for? :frown:

---
<font color=red>The preceding text is assembled from information stored in an unreliable organic storage medium. As such it may be innacurate, incomplete, or completely wrong</font color=red> :wink:
 

slvr_phoenix

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Well... The way I try to look at it (to stop me constantly bitching about my work rig ) is that at least it encourages me to optimise my software more ..

I've written stuff which I would have been happy with on a 2Ghz+ machine, but because I was having to wait ages I ended up at least doubling the speed with a few little tweak ideas, which I'd possibly never have thought of otherwise, as there'd be no incentive.
That is the silver lining as it were. I could say that the same goes for me, but I grew up programming on crap for hardware so I've always tried to optimize. Oh for my military days when it'd take my software 45 minutes just to compile. I kind of miss that. You got to work on a lot of your own projects when you had to wait like that. Or MUD. That was always an option too. :) And of course if I really wanted to drag that time out longer then I'd listen to MP3s at the same time so that the CPU and hard drive would be munched to oblivion. **evil grin**

[Never gonna happen]
I reckon all the game programmers should be forced into writing software on stuff that's like 60% of the best hardware at the time of release.. at least it would encourage them to not be overly reliant on users having decent hardware...
[/never gonna happen]
I agree. At the very least they should be forced to run with 256MB RAM. It seems like they're just throwing memory down the toilet lately.

Yet now a completely blank Excel spreadsheet is 14K in size? Why? What the hell do they need all the space for?
Eh, that's M$ for you. Why is M$ so obsessed with completely uncompressed bitmaps? Why even use a Word doc at all when a rich-text file can do 99% of the same stuff and it takes up far less room, and can be zipped down to a fraction of that as well? (Since text compresses so well.)

M$ could definately use being forced to write their software on systems with 256MB of RAM and no virtual memory. Heh heh.

<A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20031017" target="_new">Then what's your poison of choice?
Soymilk. I was raised on the stuff.
Ah. What's it made of?
Soy.
Is that soy as in soylent green?</A>
 
G

Guest

Guest
>I agree. At the very least they should be forced to run
>with 256MB RAM. It seems like they're just throwing memory
>down the toilet lately.

Nothing stops you from buying 2 year old games if the newest one's don't run on your machine. Why should "I" be penalized by getting a cropped down game just because some people don't want to shell out money for a DX9 videocard and more than 256 MB Ram ? Also, pretty much any game that is out now does run on a 1 GHz cpu with 256 MB or less ram and a Geforce MX class card. Just don't expect all the eye candy and high res, high FPS gaming experience.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
 

slvr_phoenix

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Nothing stops you from buying 2 year old games if the newest one's don't run on your machine. Why should "I" be penalized by getting a cropped down game just because some people don't want to shell out money for a DX9 videocard and more than 256 MB Ram ? Also, pretty much any game that is out now does run on a 1 GHz cpu with 256 MB or less ram and a Geforce MX class card. Just don't expect all the eye candy and high res, high FPS gaming experience.
bbaeyens, that's not the point and if you don't know it then you should. You're right in that there's no reason at all that games should be forced to run on old hardware. That however isn't the problem. The problem is that game developers are growing too used to having tons of memory at their disposal and are becoming <i>too</i> wasteful with their code. Memory optimization is a word that most game developers have forgotten <i>if</i> they're even old enough to have known it in the first place. There are still some good developers out there (like id) but they're becoming so rare these days that it just makes a <i>good</i> programmer sick.

And frankly I still personally believe that the dot com fall is to blame for most of that. You never saw a sorrier bunch of worthless script-kiddies-turned-professional than you did during the dot com boom. And once it crashed the good software developer market got flooded with them. We desperately need a purging. I hope that the boom of outsourcing to places like India can give us that much needed purging.

<pre><b><font color=red>I've always wondered why people liken the taste of blood to copper.
It tastes much more like iron to me.
<- :evil: - :evil: - :evil: - :evil: - :evil: -></font color=red></b></pre><p>
 

CaptainNemo

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RAM is cheap anyway - I have 1GB of 'generic' Crucial PC2100; I don't need the speed, but I do need the breathing room.

My mother's laptop (PIII 1Ghz) only has 256MB, and doing anything memory intensive (like copying the contents of a 128MB flash card) brings the system to a crawl. I got so cheesed off with that I removed winXP (not my choice) and put win2k on instead; hopefully, she won't notice the difference...

Btw, is it normal to hate winXP? I can't stand it; it's as if someone has sat at my nice win2k desk and rearranged everything just to piss me off...

"Some mice have two buttons. Macintosh has one. So it's extremely difficult to push the wrong button." - Apple ad. circa 1984.
 
Btw, is it normal to hate winXP? I can't stand it; it's as if someone has sat at my nice win2k desk and rearranged everything just to piss me off...

LOL.

You do realize that you can make XP look like 2000 with the 'classic Windows' settings? I mean if that's the ONLY reason you don't like XP... then that's not much of a reason; considering it's reversible.

:smile:


<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>
 

CaptainNemo

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If I could make it look exactly like win2k, then I wouldn't mind. However, I can't make XP windows look like win2k windows with-nothing-apart-from-file/preview-info-in-the-left-hand column. Furthermore, XP changes lots of shortcut paths and puts stuff in stupid places; I just don't get it.

"Some mice have two buttons. Macintosh has one. So it's extremely difficult to push the wrong button." - Apple ad. circa 1984.
 

jihiggs

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examples... you sound like some one who sat down and used it for 2 min at the most. oh oh! things are a little different, some good some bad, thats it i hate it cause i hate change.

wpdclan.com cs game server - 69.12.5.119:27015
 

CaptainNemo

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If that were the case, I would still be using win95.

I just think the cosmetic aspect of XP is a backward step.

"Some mice have two buttons. Macintosh has one. So it's extremely difficult to push the wrong button." - Apple ad. circa 1984.
 

g5_inside

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2 gigs of ram on my g5, and it could handle much much more. More than any PC. Then again you don't need that much ram unless you are doing some complicated video editing or such that no PC could handle anyway!
 

CaptainNemo

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I don't have $4000, and I wouldn't buy an overpriced pretty box like the G5 if I did...

"Some mice have two buttons. Macintosh has one. So it's extremely difficult to push the wrong button." - Apple ad. circa 1984.
 

Vapor

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WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? First of all, any 64-bit system can handle 2GB+ of RAM, much like your mediocre G5. Additionally, have you read the thread titled: "G5s trampled by PCs"? Click the link on the first post of that thread and read the entire article, it should make you want to trade in your pretty-box for something that A) costs less B) has more software and hardware available C) IS CLEARLY FASTER!!!!!! Once you read that article come back and explain to me why your system is better than an Opteron or DUAL OPTERON system. The G5 clearly isn't what Apple claims it is (mainly because they want to make money by selling stupid computers to stupid people like you).

Now get out of here.

RDRAM = ENEMY
 

lhgpoobaa

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Exactly.
I went to winXP for better gaming and backward compatibility, but really dont like all the added "fluff" and restricitons on not being able to do low level administrator stuff to my OS.

<b>I am not a AMD fanboy.
I am not a Via fanboy.
I am not a ATI fanboy.
I AM a performance fanboy.
And a low price fanboy. :smile:
Regards,
Mr no integrity coward.</b>