When I did my last round of server and desktop deployments here at
the house[1], I tried to set up each of my servers (Windows Server
2003) with at least 256MB of RAM and each of the desktops (Windows XP
Pro) with 512MB. That may sound backwards, but I was working with what
I could scrounge and frankly, the desktops in this house do a lot more
work than the servers.
Ever since Steph's computer died,
she's been using the kids' computers. Now, I've known for a while that
it is noticeably slower than our machines, but it does have the slower
processor, the motherboard has a slower front-side bus[2], the hard
drive is smaller and older (which means slower), and it had the least
powerful video card, so I didn't think it terribly strange. Steph has
been complaining about it, and since she's been using it regularly
while we wait for the parts to rebuild her machine, I finally decided
to take a look and see what I could do to speed it up -- maybe defrag
the hard drive, run a spyware scan, that sort of thing.
Turns out the damn thing only had 128MB of RAM.[3] Obviously, I
didn't get 512MB in that system. I can only speculate that I thought I
was putting a single 256MB stick of RAM in there after a late night of
troubleshooting, and promptly forgot to a) check the machine while it
was booting up and b) scrounge the rest of the RAM.
It's amazing how much faster it runs now.
[1] Dear Lord. I don't set up computers for my wife and kids, I deploy desktops. I've been doing this too long.
[2] The front-side bus (FSB)
is a techy term for how fast the CPU can access other portions of the
computer; in this day and age, a FSB is usually somewhere around an
order of magnitude (10x) lower than the CPU's rated speed. A 1GHz CPU
might be running in a system with a 100MHz FSB, which means the system
is configured with a 10x clock multiplier. The same CPU on a system
with a 133MHz FSB would be running on a x7.5 multiplier. Clear?
[3] Although this is not the
absolute minimum amount of RAM you need to get Windows XP to boot, it
is considered the bare minimum in order to do anything useful[4].
[4] As long as you define "useful" as "Able to open Notepad by itself, within 30 seconds."