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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?"
You can get a Santa Rosa platform Centrino chipset in May, which will allow for 4 GB of RAM, with 2 x 2 GB sticks. However, 2 GB SODIMMs aren't cheap...
with a few smaller ewes instead?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Did you bother even looking at the summary? The poster clearly asks about laptops with MORE than 4GB of RAM.
You've got a couple of problems to deal with. The first is power consumption - two 2GB modules will consume a crazy amount of power. It's quite surprising just how much power a couple of modules require. The second is space. Current DRAM components are too large to fit 2GB worth on a single SODIMM. Take a look at the space on a DDR2 UDIMM and you'll see that there's almost no extra room on one of them.
2GB SODIMMs are built - I've worked on some creative designs that stacked DRAM components to achieve the necessary density, but the modules aren't suited for laptops because they're too thick and a notebook can't provide the necessary cooling.
It seems to me that you're a year or two ahead of technology, I'm afraid.
-h-
I sugest a Thinkpad. They are durable, small, ment for portible offices. Most allow a preinstalled 4GB or more of RAM. I know some go over 6. They are pricey but they are worth it I feel. So check them out.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
good god.
4 GB should be enough for everyone.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
Its completely plausable he's got Win 2k3 installed, depending on what he's developing.
Max addressable memory on 32bit XP pro (and probably Vista too) is 4GB, but that is with together videomemory. So actual useful RAM from 3 to 3.6 GB, depending on the board. Some system even only report 2 GB from 4. To have complete 4GB you have to use 64bit Windows. There exist 16 GB laptops, but they run Solaris IIRC.
http://www.tadpole.com/products/notebooks/bullfrog dp.asp
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o Dual CPU 1.2GHz UltraSPARC-IIIi, 1 MB level 2 Cache with 1GB-8GB memory per CPU (Up to 16GB total)
o Solaris 9 Operating Environment
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o Mobile server consolidation - the 22 lbs Bullfrog Dual Processor replaces a typical 450 lbs server box (with power backup modules) with no loss in performance or connectivity
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* Redundancy:
o Dual Disk Drives with capacity of up to 200GB (100GB + 100 GB)
o Built in UPS
o Dual Processors
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* Accessories & Upgrades: A wide range of accessories that enhance Tadpole Bullfrog usability
4Bb : 32 bit^2 ?
I guess those would be Biggabits.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Why not have a big behemoth server sitting on the net somewhere and access it remotely using a nice wireless OSX machine?
...you could always hop on Ebay and buy one of those old-school lunchbox style portable computers...just gut the innards and install your own stuff...
Heavier and larger than a laptop, but capable of carrying around a tower's computational power...not very convienient, I know, but still...it is an option...
Living With a Nerd
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.
Wow. Apparently 640K is enough for everybody.
Instead of creating a portable development environment/lab on your laptop, why not setup a secure network, and use something like Remote Desktop or VNC to access your big-beefy-box (BBB) at the office?
Use the laptop for light file editting and whatnot, then upload the files to your remote BBB for compilation and testing.
I used to do this at a former job when telecommuting. It was a lot easier when I could simply access "my desktop" exactly as it was as if I were sitting in the office. Well, OK, I only had 1 monitor when telecommuting, but I could still be productive.
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 typing this on an IBM Thinkpad T60p. One has to look very hard to find the word Lenovo on it. It says IBM in big bright letters. Levnovo has the right to use the IBM brand for 5 years and is partly owned by IBM. I should add that until 10 days ago I worked for IBM.
Lasers Controlled Games!
But, he's said he's running specific development tools. It's not like he can suddenly change them en masse. He may have no choice but to run Vista, which by all accounts wants memory like you wouldn't believe.
He's also making the valid observation that he can forsee one or more virtual machines being hosted on this machine (I have a whole separate machine to host virtual PCs). Virtual machines are a huge help in development since you can wipe them out and start from scratch without any down time. it's a realistic thing to plan for. They're great for sandboxes and doing all sorts of testing.
The reality of it is, the tools he is running are probably something he can't escape -- those are the tools, and you can't replace Visual Studio with vim and gcc easily, as much as people like to think. Sometimes, you're stuck using those tools you're given, because that's what your company is going to use no matter what you like.
Well, with the overheads of Vista, I can see it becoming such that a laptop can't possibly be used as a development machine. I know within my company, when I used to say I want 2GB or so on a machine, they would look at me like "who could possibly need that much RAM?"; now, it's commonplace. The reality is, 1GB of RAM on my development machine (older, needs an upgrade desperately) is a joke (cause using 1GB of RAM on a Windows machine means you're using >= 1GB of swap space).
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of vi (been using it for about 20 years), and I have good memories of using gcc back in the day -- but, I just never understand why the advice on Slashdot is to always migrate to tools which aren't applicable for the person at hand. If you write Windows software, you're probably using some big software to do it in.
Unfortunately, laptops have always trailed behind desktops in terms of how big you can make them. But, if you need the big-honking machine, and also need a laptop, you could be SOL.
Granted, I come from an era where having 8GB of ram on any machine (let alone one with a single user) would be absurd (unimagible in fact) -- but, it's awfully tough to develop enterprise software on mickey mouse machines. I bet there's quite a few people who could benefit from a laptop with > 4GB. I do agree with you that this is partly the fault of the OS for becoming so damned bloated. I just don't think it will help this particular gentleman's problem.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You could wait, spend a fortune, lug a desktop, or even buy a mac as everyone here has suggested, perhaps.
But the real question is, What is it that you need a +4GB laptop for? Sometimes, (many times perhaps) we have a problem that we get an idea how to solve that may or may not be the most effective way to do it. We then go and as questions about how to accomplish individual steps in our not particularly effective method.
But depending on the problem, it is sometimes better to ask about the actual problem. Someone is bound to have solved it or something similar or have an insight that would make many of our steps (hopefully the hardest ones) unnecessary.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...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.
Loading...
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.
/me salutes
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Nooo, he is considering buying a laptop with 4 Bb (Byte bits) of RAM.
Take off every 'sig' !!
if all that you want is Big RAM.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I could easily run W2K3 server, SQL 2005 and host at least two VM sessions. One of these VM sessions would be a W2K3 server, with the other an XP client.
Since many of my clients tend to be places that are fairly paranoid I cant always access my lab remotely or hook up to their network. In essence I need a "lab in a box".
There's another problem that's not in your list... He's moving to Vista!
(This comment is not meant to inspire hatred of anything. It is meant to make people laugh.)
(Normally, I wouldn't have to explain that... but this is Slashdot!)
How about a small, light laptop that you are comfortable using, paired with a powerful server back in the office. Pair the laptop with either an internal or external EVDO card (we use the Sprint Novatel EVDO cards), IPSec VPN back to the company, and then RDP into the server. Of course you could still run some applications (email, web, etc...) locally, but the really beefy stuff should run on the server. This has many performance advantages, but also reliability advantages in that your works can be on a server that is RAIDed and backed up. Additionally you can compile code and run tests on the server when you have to turn your laptop off.
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.
that some people need to run the WHOLE shebang and on top of it simulate traffic/load conditions on the db server OR on the app server OR on the client and simluate hundreds/thousands of clients and that this requires immense amounts of RAM but is otherwise feasible to obtain more reliable results using virtualization? And that the same person might want to do it on the road (AKA: using the clients' tools, but away from the clients' control -- so (s)he can tweak the conditions at will) and that if you have 30-50 different enterprisey clients you don't want to have to connect remotely to your datacenter in other state -- you just want to load the whole thing in your laptop and see where is the fscking problem that makes an inventory entry take 5 minutes instead of 20 seconds, so the client will shell out the big bucks that this person deserves? (been there, done that, but in my consultant time I was hitting the road with 3-4 server-class machines in the luggage -- hotels probably hated me when the electrical bill came and yes, I carried some full-sized fire extinguishers with me also)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048