(it started with me misreading kb as mb, but i just went with it after that)
Even 512MB is unbearably slow for me these days, on an XP machine with a not unreasonable amount of apps loaded
you get used to it, really
i've been using 512 for about 4.5 years now, and that was a step up from what i had been using before
I guess it depends on what you're using it for, it's probably fine for basic office/web stuff. Still, I like to have lots of stuff open at once and even on 2GB I get a lot of swapping sometimes.
I assume your computer is too old for new RAM, because a 2GB stick is like $50 these days
right now i'm riding an old dell laptop
i run visual studio 2005 on it
with winamp and firefox (well, chrome now, i guess) running
i do everything on it, really
browsing
word documents
lots of coding
This is like a bizarro post for this thread, but here's a technology that wouldn't go anyplace but I fucking want it anyway. I want a phone where the key components are on your wrist like a watch and you just snap out a tiny bluetooth headset for answering calls.
But yeah, my family's first computer was a 286 from Packard Bell. It had (I think) 1 MB of memory and a 40 MB hard drive. My parents bought it in 1989 shortly after we moved to Alabama for about $2000. It had two 5.25" floppy drives (my dad later regretted this decision) and ran MS-DOS 3.30. I remember futzing around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys and loading up mouse drivers and whatnot or booting a different shell. I think I even dabbled in a QBasic.
Finally in 1995 or 1996 my dad caved to pressure from my brother and I we got a new computer because it was cheap. For $800 we got a computer from OfficeMax that had a 100 MHz Pentium, 16 MB of RAM, a 1 GB HD, and a 4x CD-ROM drive. For awhile we continued to use the original 14" monitor that came with the 286 as well as the dot-matrix printer.
It still gets me on occasion that my graphics card has more RAM than that computer did.
My first PC had a 640MB hard drive and that was some pretty hefty storage right there, I remember installing every game I could find just to try and fill some of that vast empty binary wasteland.
I remember in high school one of the teachers taught a computer course and we had Apple IIe comps
he once claimed that no computer would need more than 512k of ram because no conceivable software would ever need anywhere near that much memory
Load runner kicked all kinds of ass.
As for useless technology... Vista when it first came out. I had some newer nVidia card at the time and upgraded to Vista. Apparently Vista didn't like my card, so would puke every so often. nVidia tried to patch twice, didn't fix the problem and then basically said "We give up" and never fixed the problem... Since then I have been an ATI fanboy.
Also, my ATI card has outlasted any nVidia card I've owned. Maybe I should try installing Vista next time my computer goes to shit again. Not sure if I want the hassle of discovering it is still broken. Plus I'm lazy.
I still have two Zip drives lying around the house (one SCSI, one USB) that will probably never get used again. But I do use my Minidisc deck in my hi-fi for recording - I do a programme on the student union radio station, and it's good to be able to listen back to it afterwards to try and improve.
It amazes me that I can go out and buy a 1TB external hard drive for about $500 and my first computer which had a whopping 2GB of storage was around $2K.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited September 2008
My first computer was a Tandy 2000. 10 MB hard drive, which was more than enough because pretty much everything ran off of floppy discs. The only things that you needed space for were saving text files and images from the sad little paint program that came with it. Let me tell you, art is hard when you haven't got a mouse.
God, I loved that beast. Sixty pounds of honest American beige electronics. No food or drink allowed in the computer room, we had one of those squishy plastic skins to stop dirt getting into the keyboard, and God help you if you forgot to put the dust cover back on when you were done using it.
I got an iPod Nano for Christmas last year, and it still freaks me out sometimes. 4 gigs in something the size of a business card? That's some Marty McFly shit right there, son.
It amazes me that I can go out and buy a 1TB external hard drive for about $500 and my first computer which had a whopping 2GB of storage was around $2K.
This kind of thing makes me all tingly about what the future is going to bring. If we've gone from an average of what, a few GB or so 10 years ago to easily attainable terabytes now where are we going to be in 10 years time?
It amazes me that I can go out and buy a 1TB external hard drive for about $500 and my first computer which had a whopping 2GB of storage was around $2K.
This kind of thing makes me all tingly about what the future is going to bring. If we've gone from an average of what, a few GB or so 10 years ago to easily attainable terabytes now where are we going to be in 10 years time?
We're probably just going to have more storage than we will know what to do with it. For example, I bought a 4GB thumb drive today that is about the size of my thumb nail.
All I have on it is one word document.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
It amazes me that I can go out and buy a 1TB external hard drive for about $500 and my first computer which had a whopping 2GB of storage was around $2K.
This kind of thing makes me all tingly about what the future is going to bring. If we've gone from an average of what, a few GB or so 10 years ago to easily attainable terabytes now where are we going to be in 10 years time?
We're probably just going to have more storage than we will know what to do with it. For example, I bought a 4GB thumb drive today that is about the size of my thumb nail.
All I have on it is one word document.
Man, I can fill a terabyte harddrive with porn pretty easily.
Am I the only person who remembers SuperDisks? They were the same size as floppys, the drives were even backwards compatible with standard 1.44" disks and the SuperDisks stored something like 120MB.
The drives were pretty cheap as well, if cheap flash memory hadn't come along I could have seen them going somewhere.
Anyone remember APS cameras? They were supposed to be really easy to deal with loading the film and you could take different shaped photographs with them and other random shit - I bought one during the few years that they lasted and have never been arsed to buy a replacement. Trying to find places that develop the film is becoming increasingly difficult.
Pretty similar to zip disks. Made to replace floppies/35mm, were swiftly forgotten with the creation of flash drives/digital cameras and were never really widely accepted as substitutes for the old even before they were overtaken by new technology.
yeah I remember those and bought one also, but it was actually a pretty gay idea because all it really did was crop the photos by restricting the aperture
yeah, when i worked at a camera store, APS film was the bane of my existence, because you had to switch out the film loader, had to switch the paper for the first couple years i worked there, from standard 6 inch to special 4 inch paper (till machine upgrades), and it was like 10 rolls a day, so can't really put it off, but it wasn't nrealy enough to justify the hassle. Also, the easier loading was a lie, because it was still taken out of the canister to be processed and half the time, it would jam up and you had to manually extract it anyhows when you printed the pictures
yeah I remember those and bought one also, but it was actually a pretty gay idea because all it really did was crop the photos by restricting the aperture
"Panoramic" was the biggest fucking lie ever. You don't gain any width, you just lose height and then it's printed a bit bigger or something so that it appears to be wider.
yeah I remember those and bought one also, but it was actually a pretty gay idea because all it really did was crop the photos by restricting the aperture
"Panoramic" was the biggest fucking lie ever. You don't gain any width, you just lose height and then it's printed a bit bigger or something so that it appears to be wider.
Posts
like 50 gigs left on my hard drive which will shoot up to 70+ once I get the money for an external HD
dear god does photoshop ever take a lot of patience and planning to keep running
Even on 3GB Photoshop can fuck you over
Any Adobe product really
Plus I'm looking forward to trying out Chrome when I get home because Firefox 3 can still be a hog
768mb ram here, new computer with 4gb coming tomorrow
holy shit that thing is going to be crazy, going from 768mb ram, AGP 6600GT and athlon xp 2600+ to 4gb ram, 9600GT, and E8400
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
goodbye photoshop homework!
But yeah, my family's first computer was a 286 from Packard Bell. It had (I think) 1 MB of memory and a 40 MB hard drive. My parents bought it in 1989 shortly after we moved to Alabama for about $2000. It had two 5.25" floppy drives (my dad later regretted this decision) and ran MS-DOS 3.30. I remember futzing around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys and loading up mouse drivers and whatnot or booting a different shell. I think I even dabbled in a QBasic.
Finally in 1995 or 1996 my dad caved to pressure from my brother and I we got a new computer because it was cheap. For $800 we got a computer from OfficeMax that had a 100 MHz Pentium, 16 MB of RAM, a 1 GB HD, and a 4x CD-ROM drive. For awhile we continued to use the original 14" monitor that came with the 286 as well as the dot-matrix printer.
It still gets me on occasion that my graphics card has more RAM than that computer did.
Satans..... hints.....
They were used in our architecture department at uni
So fucking expensive
Satans..... hints.....
8GB. On a phone.
My first PC had a 640MB hard drive and that was some pretty hefty storage right there, I remember installing every game I could find just to try and fill some of that vast empty binary wasteland.
Tall-Paul MIPsDroid
Load runner kicked all kinds of ass.
As for useless technology... Vista when it first came out. I had some newer nVidia card at the time and upgraded to Vista. Apparently Vista didn't like my card, so would puke every so often. nVidia tried to patch twice, didn't fix the problem and then basically said "We give up" and never fixed the problem... Since then I have been an ATI fanboy.
Also, my ATI card has outlasted any nVidia card I've owned. Maybe I should try installing Vista next time my computer goes to shit again. Not sure if I want the hassle of discovering it is still broken. Plus I'm lazy.
Too bad I don't have a five inch floppy drive anymore.
all filled with the big bopper, chuck berry and other old delights
and i have two external zip drives and a few internal ones laying around my parents place.
i should hook them up and see whats on those discs
not that I need all that space, but the ones I saw were pretty cheap
My Amiga 500 had an external hard drive.
60 fucking megabytes.
Divided into two partitions of 20 and 40, respectively.
The hard drive was as the whole computer. My computer used to fucking sit on the hard drive. This is what the computer looked like:
Imagine a huge beige box that this thing sat on.
Just for 60 MB of storage
God, I loved that beast. Sixty pounds of honest American beige electronics. No food or drink allowed in the computer room, we had one of those squishy plastic skins to stop dirt getting into the keyboard, and God help you if you forgot to put the dust cover back on when you were done using it.
I got an iPod Nano for Christmas last year, and it still freaks me out sometimes. 4 gigs in something the size of a business card? That's some Marty McFly shit right there, son.
This kind of thing makes me all tingly about what the future is going to bring. If we've gone from an average of what, a few GB or so 10 years ago to easily attainable terabytes now where are we going to be in 10 years time?
Tall-Paul MIPsDroid
We're probably just going to have more storage than we will know what to do with it. For example, I bought a 4GB thumb drive today that is about the size of my thumb nail.
All I have on it is one word document.
On the one hand, I hope you're right. I've been promised my neurocannula for long enough, and it's time for technology to pay up.
On the other hand, can you imagine getting linked to 4chan or some other cesspool while your brain was directly connected to the interface? Hurgh.
So you know
I'm safe
The drives were pretty cheap as well, if cheap flash memory hadn't come along I could have seen them going somewhere.
Tall-Paul MIPsDroid
Pretty similar to zip disks. Made to replace floppies/35mm, were swiftly forgotten with the creation of flash drives/digital cameras and were never really widely accepted as substitutes for the old even before they were overtaken by new technology.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)