RAM in the past and now in 2010?

Well Recently Since Opera 10.5 was released its been a pig for my system. Its taking my system to 4 GB of ram being used ( with other programs running obviously though). I have 6 so 2 GB is left.

Its all good but it made me think about when 512 or 1GB ( for me at least) was what we had and more than 2GB was unheard of or only Pro home computers had? I remember always being concerned about my ram not going to overboard or everything would start lagging if not crashing on my xp media edition.

Ahh those were the days and I made every little bit count. Now I don't ever worry about it...sometimes .. I think to myself I wish my system would use my ram thats just sitting there until it came with Opera 10.5 and I didnt know what to think?


I know some of you use way more than that, but for the regular household and such under 3b or 4 GB is perfectly fine.
Just wanted to let my thoughts out today and see how people feel now vs a couple years ago.

My system at work still has 512K of RAM and a 380 GB drive with a single core processor....

At home, I run a dual core (each core at roughly the same speed as the single core at work) with 4GB of memory and 1.5 TB of hard drive. I have as much memory on my video card as the system at work has total, and I have a modest vido card.

BTW - My first computer had 3K of RAM.

The thing about the one at work is probably looked at by IT and anything that shouldn't be running is not run right? It is like that at my school with only 150gb drive with a dual core and 1.5gb of ram and they limit what we can use. It runs insanely fast on xp still also but still limited.

wow @ 3k of ram then when I will be older people will probably say wow only 6 GB or ram or 8 give or take

My first computer experience was a room sized mainframe computer with a whole megabyte of RAM in the mid 70's... When we got memory errors, we could actually shut off a bank (256K) of memory, re-boot and start processing in degraded mode.

Look in the Old Timers' thread I started and you will see that at least one person here has been using computers since the 50's.

I don't really know what the computing was like in NASA, but I am pretty confident that many of us use cell phones with more computing power and RAM than the ones they used to land a man on the moon.

When I built my current computer in June 09 I put in 8GB of DDR2 800 because I could afford it. It only cost $100. Now that same amount of memory (even DDR2) will cost you $200. Guess memory being the most bang for the buck are over. Yes, June 09 is not that far in the past. Only 100 dollars ago.

drywallguy said:

When I built my current computer in June 09 I put in 8GB of DDR2 800 because I could afford it. It only cost $100. Now that same amount of memory (even DDR2) will cost you $200. Guess memory being the most bang for the buck are over. Yes, June 09 is not that far in the past. Only 100 dollars ago.

Well the prices change beacuse of the materials cost varies so much at times. Although I am not sure thats the whole reason why they cost so much since they were already created.

And my whole point was, I felt we are getting to closer to where even 6 or 8 gb of ram wont be enough for household computers (wont be anytime soon) but once more programs can run x64 and use more memory we could hit our limit.

Runckle said:

My computer runs with 4GB of memory. The other day I Transcoded 2 movies at the same time and still only used 24% of memory. (Nero 8 & DVD Flick)

Doesn't that use cpu power more than memory? Since all its doing is cpu intensive work?

Sorry to stray. I've been stewing on that for awhile and couldn't help but vent.
I've been installing 8GB for my customers figuring that would be overkill but as we are finding it's only a little above adequate for x64 CAD and Catia and everything that goes with them.
If you would have told me that 5 years ago I would have said bull*%#t.

pebbly said:

i can remember paying £184 for 8mb!!!

I think that is $200 American.