A couple of weeks ago I ordered hardware to replace my CPU, motherboard and memory on an old server box I keep in my office for testing. At the time I was running Vista on the box and running Vista on this Pentium M 2.4 gig machine with 2 gig of RAM is absolutely unbearable. Amazing - I'm   pretty happy with Vista on my dual-core laptop but on that old box Vista downright sucks. I wouldn't wish this experience on anyone in a production environment. I suspect the same things happen on my dual core machine but it's not as noticable because the second processor keeps the OS and other applications alive so it's not as noticable. <shrug>

Anyway after sitting around waiting for Explorer to return a cursor to me for the umpteenth time I decided - even for a test box that's running 5 different OS's - it's not worth keeping this old box around as is. So I went online and bought new components to replace the innards of the box. I ended up with a dual core 3ghz machine with 2 gig for a little over $600. No brainer right?

But what really blew me away was the price of memory - I got 2 gigs of memory for $75 minus a $30 dollar discount. Whoa... Next thing we know they'll give it away.

So after the stuff arrived a couple of days ago I figured I might as well bump my laptop to 4 gig as well while prices are this low. Unfortunately - because of the way most laptop manufactures stack memory - I have to throw out the old 2 gig memory to replace for 4 gig but with prices like this that's hardly a concern. I can pass my memory on to somebody else. Even with shipping to Hawaii 4 gig of highspeed DDR memory with 2 chips was $110 - again minus a $30 discount. $80 for 4 gigs of memory? This is insane.

Memory has been the single most important thing to make machines run better - especially on Vista and I don't think there's any excuse anymore to not have at least 2 gig of memory in a machine. At these prices there's no better way to increase performance of any machine running XP or Vista.

It's funny if I look back nearly 20 years. I remember going to computer trade shows looking for memory and I remember paying nearly $500 for some ridiculously small amount of money (I think it was something like 4 megs which was HUGE at the time <s> - think of all of that EMS memory). At the time $500 was by far the most expensive part of the computer. And it a shitload for me to spend at the time - more than anything I had ever spent money except my car (maybe <g> - I had a bunch of scary old beaters).

How times change. It's amazing how far we've come and to think how much horsepower we have in our machines today compared to back then. Nowadays kids end up with a perfectly low high end machine for almost that same $500 I spent nearly 20 years ago (and in 1980's $$$ at that)...