> I just bought from Dell a laptop (dual-core) and a desktop (quad) for 700 

> laptop has a 250 Gb HD and the desktop a 750 Mb HD and a 20 inch screen.
> 
> The trick with Dell is that there's always some "special deals" available 
> and if you're already a client they bombard you with discount vouchers and 
> such. Also, it's sometimes possible to buy at discount or even bulk prices 
> (down to 40% off), when one belongs to an organisation that is in 
> partnership with Dell.

Damn. My company *is* in a partnership with Dell. We bought 12 new PCs - 
OptiPlex 755 with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM and some 

unit. What the heck do you know that I don't???

(As an aside... is there a reason why Dell is always 3x more expensive 
than, say, HP, IBM, Acer, any other company on Earth?)

> Unless one works exclusively with text-based applications, there's *** never 
> *** enough RAM.

Really? I seem to have way more than I need. It's almost never fully 
utilised, except when trying to build huge histograms. (Not a common 
activity, obviously.)

> Others have mentioned it already, but even cheap cameras and 
> camcorder can now generate massive amounts of data and one needs a lot of 
> RAM to handle this smoothly.

Well, I was editing CDs on a machine with 2 MB of RAM about 10 years 
ago... For complex video effects I guess you do need to hold quite a bit 
of data in RAM at once though.

> Particularly, non-geek family members can be 
> extremely Gigabytes-hungry once they figured out that one can take 
> great-looking movies of everything that moves ("no, you can't attach 15 Gb = 
> 90 min of high-def wailing baby movie to your email and send it to all your 
> friends")...

That's not even funny.

Sure, I can see needing huge amounts of HD space. I'm just not seeing 
much need for huge RAM. And besides, I was talking about the bare 
minimum amount of RAM required for Vista to even consider operating. 
Presumably if Vista needs 2 GB to run, if you want to edit video *as 
well* you'd need even more RAM...

(BTW... I did wonder why the hell WeV has 4x 360 GB drives. Until I 
discovered that every single one of them is full to busting with illegal 
DVDs he's downloaded. *shivers*)

> But even for non-graphic, professional applications, there's never enough 
> RAM anyway: the more you have, the more you will be tempted to use and will 
> end up using: Law of the Constantly Maxed Out Resources.

Other than audio and video data (which is inherantly large), I can't 
think of anything you can do with a computer that actually uses much 
memory. Playing games involves audio and video data, but I'm 
hard-pressed to think of anything else...

(Unless you're running some kind of server. Don't do that unless you 
have stacks of... well, everything really!)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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