My workstation is a Dell 4600 that I got about this time last year. It originally came seriously underpowered with only 256 MB of PC3200 DDR RAM so I immediately bought an additional 512 and have been running 768MB for the last year pretty well.
Over the last couple of months, though, I have noticed some serious lag, especially when running Outlook, SQL Server (MSDE), Visual Interdev, Visual Studio.NET, a couple of IE windows, Firefox with several tabs, and Macromedia Flex Builder (more on this later) - which is a serious system hog - all at the same time.
About 2 weeks ago I ordered 1GB of PC3200 RAM (2 - 512MB sticks) to replace the original 256 that came with the system (2 - 128MB sticks). I now have a whopping 1.5GB of RAM and everything seems to be working beautifully and much faster!
1.5GB of RAM - that is just amazing to me. I never imagined that I would have that much in a desktop system. My first PC (a Compaq 486) didn’t even have a hard-drive that large - I think it was only 400MB. And it only had 4MB of RAM. I remember being astounded by the improvement I got when I upgraded to 8MB! I also clearly remember upgrading the video card of my first Pentium from 4MB internal video to a 16MB ATI card (I now have a 256MB GForce FX 5200)! Of couse I still have that Pentium machine sitting over in the corner running Red Hat, Apache, and PostGreSQL and its 16MB ATI video card is quite sufficient. I’m sad to say that I don’t have that old Compaq any longer - it got moved from the electronics junk bin to the trash bin a couple of moves ago. Unfortunately, mt wife’s acceptance of the electronic junk bin is proportional to the size of the junk bin.
It’s funny how things change, but remain the same.