On Mon, 21 Nov 2011, Julien Goodwin <luv-lists@studio442.com.au> wrote:
er, RAM is now $10/GB. I see no reason for using anything less then 8 or 16.
Um, mobos that can only fit 4GB?
Either they're single stick mobo's for compact systems, or you should upgrade.
The biggest problem that I have observed is motherboards with Intel chipsets that can only address 4G of RAM and reserve ~700M of that for PCIe thus leaving only ~3.3G of addressable RAM. My latest system has 4 DIMM slots and only 3.3G usable.
Laptops that are new can barely take many more. Still. Stupid market only wanting Windows 32 bit.
My (now four year) old T61 could take 8GB (except it overheated, 6GB was reliable).
A large part of my motivation for moving to a desktop was to avoid the heat problems in my Thinkpad which had 5G and could have been expanded to 8G. 3.3G is enouugh as I use a Xen server on my network (compared to KVM on localhost when using the Thinkpad) and I avoid having too many Chromium tabs open at once.
The upgrading treadmill that crappy developers force upon us because they can't be bothered to write efficient programs anymore are a great cause of the wastage that modern society suffers from. I keep buying machines that are maxed out with memory at purchase time, but a few years down the track are suffering with a workload that doesn't seem like it should be all that different. Meanwhile, I can't just upgrade ram, because the mobo is already maxed out. I have to upgrade the whole computer despite the rest of it still working well (partly because I've been able to incrementally improve bits of it as bits improved).
I will say that some of this is new algorithms that are only practical with large amounts of RAM, some of the simulation stuff we use in Google NetOps is like that.
Sure, but then there's the fact that web browsing worked quite nicely on a system with 16M of RAM in 1995 and a significant part of my web browsing hasn't changed much since then.
I don't want a desktop because I want my electricity usage to be below a constant 60watts. My 2 laptops and a small pile of external disks manages this according to my UPS.
I only run a desktop at work because I'm forced to, and my one at home is for games. Haven't done proper power measurements on my servers though, but I do everything possible to keep the power usage down, as that keeps the heat down.
One thing to note is that you have to measure these things. There is overlap between laptop and desktop power use. You can get a 64bit desktop system running on about 60W including monitor while the high-end laptops apparently exceed 100W - I've heard accounts of airlines providing only 120W of electricity to a passenger and having the circuit-breaker trip when a laptop is plugged in. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/