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Laptops with Big RAM?
Fubari wonders: "Anybody know when laptops over 4gb might be coming out? Some of the dev-tools I want to run are just obscene RAM-pigs. On the desktop I'm using now (Win2003), it sucks up 1.6gb just to boot. By the time I log in and start doing work, it is stretching 2Gb. Move that to Vista, add a VM-Ware session or two, and I'm worried I'll be pushing 4Gb. I'm torn between buying a 4Bb-max laptop now, or some mini-desktop
that can fit in a set of luggage wheels. A friend of mine suggested something like this, but my first choice would be something designed to be portable. Any suggestions?"
Did you bother even looking at the summary? The poster clearly asks about laptops with MORE than 4GB of RAM.
Its completely plausable he's got Win 2k3 installed, depending on what he's developing.
...By a laptop you like and upgrade it with 2 2GB ram sticks. Couldn't be much more simple than that, eh?
Someone didn't read the summary... :)
I think its pretty safe to assume that given the initial info the user is probably doing Windows development. Thats really only going to work on a x86 or x86_64 machine running windows, and windows development tools. Anything else is just fracturing the issue, and not contributing to a solution. Face it Open Source, MAC, Unix, and all the rest are wonderful, but some of us....ALOT of us are stuck in a WinTel world.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
He's already doing virtualization with VMWare, so what's a little bit more?
submitter: How can I install a 120-gallon gas tank on my car? I need to drive New York/Los Angeles *FAST*.
slashdot crowd: Have you considered taking the plane?
you: Stop suggesting alternate forms of transportation, some of us are afraid to fly.
...I'm running 2003 Server with SQL Server 2005, a bunch of our services, and IIS 6.0 all running and I'm using less than 600 MB.
Maybe you should figure out what's wrong with your machine that requires 1.6 GB of RAM just to idle.
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He probably meant that it takes 1.6GB to load up the dev-tools. ;-)
I mean, he can't see how much RAM he's using at the login-prompt anyway, can he? =)
He might be getting his numbers from some source that doesn't subtract the system cache, though.
It's not uncommon for people to rant about how much RAM they're using when 70% of it are just cache that are still available for applications.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
You don't mention what tools you are using but:
- There's probably a lot of file caching going on so that doesn't matter as it will discard unused cache to fulfill your memory allocation requests as you run (low overhead).
- If you're running SQLServer, for example, by default it grabs a huge chunk of memory for caching. You can control how much it uses for this (set the max value) in the configuration tool. At one time, it defaulted to as much as all your memory minus 128M for the OS or something similarly large. Step 1 was to drop it down to a more reasonable level (like 256M total).
- Look for lots of other 'tools' that start on boot or on login and grab up memory... things like indexing services and the like.
You'd better be damned sure that the HW manufacturers support the devil, otherwise it's a bumpy ride. Even moreso than a normal Windows Experience.