What the hell is an SDD?
Solid State Drive.
Can you bring me back some TAB the next time you go to the store?
Must admit, I’m quite surprised you’re not familiar with Crucial Cory. I’ve been using them in both a personal and professional capacity for years now and was of the understanding that most UK based techies knew who they were.
Who’s Crucial Cory?
The price/performance curve hit its stride around 1995, and after decades when a couple gigs of RAM would cost more than the server you were buying it for, you could max out all the RAM slots in any computer for a couple hundred bucks.
Are you remembering this correctly? I’m pretty sure that systems with 1GB+ RAM didn’t become economically viable until the mid-2000s.
See: http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-historic-price-of-ram/
The brother of Badass Bill?
Seagate sells a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter for their portable drives that works with un-cased drives perfectly. I’ve completed lots of fast, error-free disk clones with it. They sell it for $20. I couldn’t find a direct link to it, but it’s the first item in this list of accessories. Model STAE104.
Together they are indispensable and unbeatable.
no, he’s right.
S
D?
D
Solid
STATE
Drive
I had to click through the headline just to figure out what it was supposed to be, and it’s typo’d that way the entire write-up. Mr. Doctorow: 
don’t you remember? they had a hit rap song about being from the mid-west in the late 90’s? “Hayyyyyy! in the middle of the baaaarrrn!”
The machine I’m looking at buying now (Intel i5, Win7, SSD for the boot drive) will support up to 32 GB or RAM, but this sounds a bit absurd. Can anyone opine on the foolhardiness of paying for this much RAM?
Depends on your needs, but virtual machines are the future and VMs love memory. My Macbook has 16GB and between the local OS, WinXP VM (don’t ask), Win7 VM, Ubuntu VM, and a virtualized VMWare lab I hit my memory limit on a semi-regular basis…
More than 16 is massive overkill for “ordinary use”, unless you are maxing everything you can probably spend the money better (eg bigger ssd).
16 is a solid choice right now I think. 8 is the budget choice.
Of course one way to save a good bit on a pre-built machine is to buy it with the minimum and buy replacement RAM separately. Computer sellers often gouge horribly on RAM. Need to be comfortable doing that though.
Edit:
Heh, yea see waht Jared_Kaufman is doing to max out 16gb. 
It depends on your needs, if you don’t know what your needs are then get 8, 16 if its cheap 
Of course, after you posted this Amazon jacked the price up to $520.
The machine I built in 1995 had 16 MB of RAM, and while it wasn’t top of the line, it was pretty typical for a machine of the era. It also has a Pentium clocked at 75Mhz. Doom was butter smooth on it, which didn’t help when that jerk with the 25Mhz 486 joined the game and sucked the framerate down into the single digits.
it was a “cyber monday” deal
Are you sure? I remember looking at the monday deal page and didn’t find it–I’ve been eyeing this particular model for a while–but the page indicated it was a lower price.
On 12/3/2013 10:23 AM, SteampunkBanana wrote:
