And here I am with both Home Premium, installed, and Pro on a disk. Too bad my laptop only holds 8 gigs.

There might be... I'll look to see what I can dig up. If not I guess I'll get the Pro version.

I know, I was just trying to be funny. 16 seemed great, but I figured with the low cost of Ram these days why not drop in another 16. I also wanted to have the full set in all 4 dimms for cosmetic purposes.

I remember buying 256 meg of ram once...and paying $250 for it....only to be offered back 400 by the shop who wanted it for another customer....would have done it too...but then I would have been without it myself.

These days you'd get 256meg free in a Weeties packet ...by comparison.

I've seen sales for a 2gig DDR3 stick @ less than 70 US at Radio Shack and they're expensive!

kona0197, depends upon where you shop. I have seen recently 4gb ddr3 sticks for au$35 in some local shops, and have bought 5 8gb usb sticks for $33 ( or a total of 40gb for $33)

harpo

One task I can think of....virtual machines...

For emphasis...it ain't that expensive.

RND...I could max out my MoBo with that for under 120 ...... [mine's 6 banks of max 4]...

...but then I'd have 12 that I couldn't use - no other machine it'd suit...

Since we're kind of rambling...

Any of you guys that are RAM-flush ever set up a RAM drive with it?  I've always wondered if it was really worth the effort.

Ram drives are nice but situational.

Setting one up requires specific software for the task, and increases boot times.

If you play a particular, load intensive game, on a regular basis, it makes perfect sense.  It also makes more sense if your computer is always on.  I don't and I shut it down at night, so I've never gotten around to it despite having 32GB to play with.

If you're bottle necked by the drive and regularly use a particular program with heavy loading times, go for it.  The software is cheap, the gains are utterly massive over a disk drive.  Still massive over a fast SSD, but more like 10x than 50x.

There's also one area where the proper software would be... fantastic.

If you're one of those stupid schmucks that bought a 32-bit operating system because your brain didn't finish developing, you can use it to create a page file disk using extra ram your gimped piece of shit operating system can't access...  Once you've got your just as fast as regular memory page file, 32-bit piece of shit operating system isn't so shit anymore.  You have to be particular in software selection, RamDisk Plus is the only one I'm sure works this way.

I've got a few games I really like that get their panties in a twist over not having a page file, and paging a drive is a terrible thing to do to yourself, and the drive.  I might actually do it one of these days just to end that crap.

I was just saying that DDR3 ram ain't that high. It's the older stuff that gets expensive.