Grab your Phillips, it's...
The Latest from The Screwdriver List!
The article is to be titled "Peter Norton's Guide to PC CPUs for the New
Millennium." Should be posted within the month, or thereabouts.
As to how much more RAM, if your hard drive light ever comes on while you
are working (other than when accessing a new document file for the first
time, and the like) then you may be doing some unnecessary swapping to
disk. That for sure will slow down your PC (around a thousandfold!). So
that is one measure of how much is enough.
Given the current pricing (I just picked up a 256MB PC133 DIMM at Fry's for
barely over $100 the other day), I'd say that anyone who is serious about
building a PC that works well, let alone super well, needs to install at
least 256MB of RAM. If you find that you commonly run many applications
(have many windows open at once), you may well wish to increase this amount
up to around 1GB. I don't think many desktop PC users today have a real
"need" for any more than that.
As a calibration point for the preceding remarks, I'll note that I have a
LAN with six active workstations (but with only me to use them most of the
time) that I built up over the past several years. The most RAM I have in
any of them is 320MB on my principal workstation, and I think the minimum
is 96MB--which is adequate for non-demanding applications--and then a
"mere" 64MB on my laptop, which also turns out to do most jobs in an okay
manner (for my purposes and to my standards). All of these machines are
running (most of the time) some flavor of Windows 9x--mostly Windows 98SE.
I perhaps should qualify all this by saying that I am not much of a gamer.
So my opinions and experiences might not count for a whole lot for those of
you are avid, hard-core game enthusiasts.
John
At 06:51 AM 1/10/01 +0000, you wrote:
>Grab your Phillips, it's...
>The Latest from The Screwdriver List!
>
>
>Thanks John. What will the name of the article be? And how much more RAM
>are we talking?
>
>Peter
>
>
>>From: "John M. Goodman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>To: Multiple recipients of The_Screwdriver_List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Subject: From The Screwdriver List: Re: Pentium, Athlon, or Duron??
>>Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 23:08:49 -0800
>>
>>And spend all the extra cash you can on more RAM and a larger hard drive.
>>Lots more RAM, in particular. Often that is more powerful than going to a
>>faster CPU.
>>
>> John
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>That's all for now from The Screwdriver List
>"Red Stripe to Pin 1"
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
=======
John M. Goodman, Ph.D., author of "Peter Norton's Inside the PC," Seventh
Edition (Sams 1997, ISBN 0-672-31041-4), and Eighth Edition (Sams 1999,
ISBN 0-672-31532-7).
=======
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That's all for now from The Screwdriver List
"Red Stripe to Pin 1"
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
