shahine.com/omar/

homepage | Send mail to the author(s) contact

yet another Microsoft blogger

# Sunday, July 23, 2006

« New SlickRun Beta | Main | IE 7b3 finally has correct text matching... »

1GB

1GB is so ghetto. My PC at home is sitting here thrashing the hard disk. I can barely run any programs. My working set right now is 700 MB and I'm only running this blogging app. Launching Photoshop and doing anything to my pictures is bad news, and running Outlook or IE at the same time? Fugataboutit.

Not to mention I finally kicked the Pentium D820 to the curb. I got so fed up with the heat that this thing generated. My CPU Fan sounded like a turbine engine most of the time, and I tried 4-5 different CPU fans in the course of a year or so. None could help my little small form factor case.

So I replaced the dual cores with a super cool, super quiet Intel Cedar Mill and I can't hear anything now except for the hard disks spinning. My CPU fan sits at around 1,100 RPMs and the CPU temp never gets over 52 degrees Celsius (compared to 65 IDLE for the D820).

Anyway, I have another 1GB on order. I am paying 50% less now for the same exact RAM I purchased a year ago.

Gear
Posted Monday, July 24, 2006    Permalink    Comments [6]  View blog reactions

Related posts:
ordered my laptop
making my PC quiet
I'm never getting that time back
Treo 670
Motorola Moto Q
Writing to you via my new G5

 

Monday, July 24, 2006 12:27:20 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
> My working set right now is 700 MB and I'm only running this blogging app

Something is wrong with your system if this is the case. 1gb is plenty for non-developers (eg, people who are really only running one or two apps at a time).

What does taskman say is eating up so much memory?
Jeff Atwood
Monday, July 24, 2006 10:57:44 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
1 Gb of RAM is plenty. Something's eating your RAM, and possibly your CPU time.

I built a POS Celeron equipped 3.6 GHz machine with 1 Gb RAM for my wife and it screams. It's definitely not the RAM. Of the entire user base I have here at CMU, most of the machines on the floor I support have 1 Gb or less of RAM and none of them have any problems at all.

Weird. Check your task "mangler," and check to see what is in your start ups.
Braden
Monday, July 24, 2006 9:36:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
A ton of processes and services are running. Things like desktop search, OneCare and on and on... a reboot gets it down to 400 MB or so.
Omar Shahine
Monday, July 24, 2006 11:58:03 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I feel so inadequate... My home system is about 6 years old now. Dell. PIII something slow. 384 MB... Somehow I still manage to run VS05 and SQL2005. Of course, my wife complains about how slow it is... Still, it's good for surfing. Good for email. That's really all we need on it.
Steve Kaschimer
Tuesday, July 25, 2006 3:09:34 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
That is why your system is so slow. Too many apps running. OneCare? Ack. No thanks. Too much of a memory hog. Desktop search is a memory hog as well. Clean down that start up list and things should be fine.
Braden
Friday, July 28, 2006 4:49:40 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Omar, compare your memory numbers with those posted here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000646.html

For reference, 128 megabytes was the original *recommended* memory for Windows XP!

I love memory as much as the next developer, but to claim that 1gb (or even 512mb, really) is necessary to run a standard system these days is a little hysterical, frankly.
Jeff Atwood
Comments are closed.