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Advice: if someone tells you 128mb is enough for Windows XP Professional, don't
believe them.
I was quite happy last week to take possession of a new laptop at work.
I had been using a Dell Latitude PII/266 running Windows 2000. When
they gave me that box, it originally had 64MB. Win98 might run in
64mb, but Windows 2000 sure doesn't. So I upgraded that box to 128mb,
which made it at least tolerable. (But as I noted in
a previous post, the lack of power still had a major impact on my
choice of tools.)
Last week I was given a new toy: a Dell Latitude 840C, which is a
P4/1.6ghz box. Nice, but again they didn't order enough memory:
this one came with 128mb. A box with with this kind of speed
is seriously hindered by a lack of memory. That's especially true for
laptops. I didn't
realize until just this week that many laptops - including the Dell -
have a 4200rpm disk. 5400rpm is what low-end desktop PCs have, and
7200rpm is much better. That slow disk speed is another reason you
want more memory: more memory=less hitting that slow disk.
So I had a P4 with Windows 2000: much faster
than the PII! But I couldn't leave well enough alone: I really wanted
to try Windows XP, but I was concerned that it wouldn't perform very
well in 128mb. I googled the net to see what folks
were saying about Windows 2000 vs XP Professional with 128mb, but
didn't find much beyond the standard advice: 128 is minimum, 256 is
recommended.
You can guess what happened next. I had to upgrade, and I promptly
turned my reasonably fast (given that I still had 128mb) machine into
a lead-footed one. Windows XP Pro seems to have a bigger memory
footprint than Windows 2000. I was hitting that little disk pretty
hard, especially during boot up.
I got a reprieve today. I put an extra 256mb in, so now
my P4 has a much more respectable 384mb of memory. And it runs
fast. It's very nice.
The moral of the story: No matter what
the hardware boys give you, the software boys will piss it away.
12:24:52 PM 
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