>> Why on Earth should they optimise a program for minimum-RAM footprint 
>> that uses only 10MB in the first place??!?!  It would be a total WASTE of 
>> time and money for precisely ZERO benefit.
>
> It saddens me that these days people think producing a superior product is 
> "a waste of time".

Look, nobody in the world apart from you cares if Word uses up 10MB or 6MB 
of RAM, Microsoft are not going to employ 50 people for a few months to go 
through and optimise for RAM usage just to make you feel better.  In fact, 
if they did that they'd probably sacrifice speed by using less 
speed-efficient data structures somewhere, compressed graphics, or such 
like.  I'm pretty sure that they don't just randomly insert code to use up 
RAM for no reason...

When they are writing something like Word, which they know is going to use a 
tiny % of RAM compared to what everyone has, I am pretty sure they 
prioritise it loading up and doing stuff quickly rather than using a minimum 
amount of RAM.  Why do it the other way round?

> You say "only" as if 10 MB is a small amount of RAM...

I can buy a 1024 MB USB stick for £5.87 (from ebuyer.com).  That makes 10 MB 
cost about 6p.  Fast RAM for a computer is about 5 or 6 times that price - 
not much is it?  The cheapest machine on the Dell website (£359) comes with 
1024 MB RAM.  I open up task manager and I have 21 processes using more than 
10MB of RAM.  To me, 10MB seems pretty small.

> Given how badly many of the PCs at work struggle to run Word, I doubt 
> that...

It's not our fault your company has updated the software without updating 
the hardware in 10 years.

> I guess it just comes down to how frustrating it is that my PC takes 30 
> seconds to load or close any given application.

Get a new PC dude - I'm pretty sure that even if you spend £50 on ebay you'd 
be way better off.  Why are you still using an ancient pile of junk to try 
and run modern software?

> I mean, 20 *years* ago computers could do that instanteneously with a 
> fraction of the RAM and CPU power. Why are we not coding like that any 
> more??

Because we (well, most of us) have better computers than we did 20 years 
ago?

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