RAM is cheap

Post #114,004 by hnick 8/16/03 6:25:46 PM Reply	RAM is cheap Go 512Mb minimum. A gig is better. I would not build a machine with less than a Gb any more. The chips are cheap and they make a lot of bottle necks wider.
Post #114,005 by tablizer 8/16/03 6:43:34 PM Reply	Doesn't more RAM eat up laptop batteries? Plus, I accidently broke the motherboard the last time I tried to install RAM. I tried to be careful, but it did an el-snappo. Had to use rubber bands to keep it together. ________________ oop.ismad.com
Post #114,050 by hnick 8/17/03 9:53:36 AM Reply	I do tend to think more in terms of desktop machines Batteries, for me, are just to keep going until I plug in again. If you really rely on battery usage, you should probably trade off performance (use less memory.) Laptops typically have teeny (even though many gigabyte) single platter, single head drives that do not have great throughput. If you want your laptop to perform anything like a desktop machine, you really do not want it spapping to disk any more than necessary. Virtual memory with a slow disk is not your friend. Just my opinion. Take with as much salt as necessary. Hugh
Post #114,054 by deSitter 8/17/03 11:45:10 AM Reply	Re: I do tend to think more in terms of desktop machines I have a "high" RPM (5400) drive in my Thinkpad. It's not that bad. And it's dead quiet. Spookily so. -drl
Post #114,064 by hnick 8/17/03 1:14:22 PM Reply	Varying mileage :) I have seen some decent IBM laptops. I don't deny that some upper level machines are quite nice. I don't tend to use laptops as my real workspace. I normally use laptops as test machines, which accounts for my point of view. If I use a browser to download a large file, an ISO disk image for example, I notice that it takes about 10 minutes, literally, to copy the image in the tmp directory to the final destination. I put that down to having one platter and one head which has to scurry back and forth to do the copying. I am aware that extra memory would not help that situation particularly. I just used it as an example really poor performance of laptop drives. I try to avoid doing anything that requires any real performance on laptops. They are either target machines or a portable terminal to a machine that I can use to do serious work. They're not bad for catching up on e-mail during boring meetings. Again, that's just me. Varying mileage, salt, etc. Hugh
Post #114,070 by deSitter 8/17/03 3:51:28 PM Reply	Re: Varying mileage :) Don't know about Windows, since it's pointless to measure ANYTHING under Windows (there being no way to really change it) - but ext2 on this A31 is blazing fast due to intelligent caching. A global find command that returns 10s of thousands of files gets entirely cached and runs at processor and memory speed when executed a second time. -drl
Post #114,009 by deSitter 8/16/03 7:16:32 PM Reply	Re: RAM is cheap 512 is enough. It goddamn well should be. -drl

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