"The RAM wall", and obsolescence

[VirtualLarry]

I would say the C2Q will have a RAM limitation before the platform becomes obsolete. I would argue the obsolescence comes more from the monetary side of things though. 4-8GB DDR2 pricing vs DDR3 pricing at the same capacity. It's simply cheaper to sell the old system and buy new stuff or at least price competitive to the point where you're not out anything.

That is true too. 8GB (2x4GB) kits of DDR2-800, are nearly $180 at Newegg. If you were lucky enough to have a P45 chipset board, then you could use two of those kits of RAM to get to 16GB of RAM ($360 total RAM cost.) Whereas with a more modern mobo, 16GB (2x8GB, or 4x4GB) of DDR3 is under $100.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I still think that RAM is more of a limiting factor than CPU. I don't know how you manage on your main rig with only 2GB of RAM. You must not browse the web very heavily.

Sounds more like you don't know how to navigate the web and so are trying to stuff the whole thing in tabs. LOL @ searching through tabs when there's speed dial and google.

 

[Atreidin]

I remember the chipset for the P3 Tualatin had an artificial limitation of 512MB. Those machines might have lasted longer if Intel didn't put that retarded limitation in the 815 chipset to try to steer people towards the P4.

 

[nenforcer]

The kind of person who uses a PC so long that they run out of ram is likely the same person who will just break down and buy a new emachine every 12 years for $250.00. Having a PC is cheap for people of this type and they certainly get their money's worth in any case.

You just described my family. They all use a computer on nearly a daily basis to pay bills, check email, etc. but have no interest in spending any of their own money to upgrade.

My Dad ran a P3 733MHz (I upgraded to 1GHz Slot 1) from 2000 until 2010. He was also on dial up internet on said machine until this point.

My sister and her family used the computer I bought for her Wedding in 2002 (very similar to my sig) until this past October when I upgraded them to a Phenom ][ system. They were content to milk that thing until it died, which it amazingly never did.

My mom is on a single core P4 I UPGRADED her to in 2010, and we intend to keep it until April 2014 when Windows XP support expires.

 

[Idontcare]

Sounds more like you don't know how to navigate the web and so are trying to stuff the whole thing in tabs. LOL @ searching through tabs when there's speed dial and google.

Don't be so quick to dismiss the benefits of spawning links in tabs for follow-up reading when doing research. Not everyone learns the same way, there is no one method of using the internet to rule them all.

 

[VirtualLarry]

They all use a computer on nearly a daily basis to pay bills, check email, etc. but have no interest in spending any of their own money to upgrade.

OT, but I'm sure that there are some IT dept personnel here that would commiserate about budgets.

Edit: I have the opposite problem. I love building computers, and I generally end up with too many of them. So I end up giving them away sometimes.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Don't be so quick to dismiss the benefits of spawning links in tabs for follow-up reading when doing research.

I'm not dismissing the benefit of spawning a new tab, I'm dismissing the benefit of never finishing with it.
If you can't use it to completion you shouldn't have opened it in the first place.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm not dismissing the benefit of spawning a new tab, I'm dismissing the benefit of never finishing with it.
If you can't use it to completion you shouldn't have opened it in the first place.

In what timeframe? Minutes? Hours? Days? Sometimes, I open things, that I don't get back to for some time. Other times, I just like to keep them around to reference.

 

[DominionSeraph]

In what timeframe? Minutes? Hours? Days? Sometimes, I open things, that I don't get back to for some time. Other times, I just like to keep them around to reference.

Well, the "RAM wall" keeping you from having 30,000 MySpace tabs open from 2005 doesn't sound like a bad thing. Learn to let go.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, the "RAM wall" keeping you from having 30,000 MySpace tabs open from 2005 doesn't sound like a bad thing. Learn to let go.

LOL. I used to be a lot worse. I would run Firefox so long and with so many tabs that Firefox and sometimes Windows would run out of GDI resources. Yes, even with 16GB of RAM, you can run out of "resources" before you actual run out of RAM. 16000 system-wide handles, with a per-process limit of something like 10000 by default.

https://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2010/03/31/3322423.aspx?Redirected=true

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840342

 

[Torn Mind]

I'm not dismissing the benefit of spawning a new tab, I'm dismissing the benefit of never finishing with it.
If you can't use it to completion you shouldn't have opened it in the first place.

I too actually like to keep a gazillion tabs. BUT, thanks to Firefox's "don't load tabs until selected" feature or Opera's session save feature, it's not a issue. I also do a little pruning from sites I'll visit again and again like Newegg, etc.