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Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 3:50 am
by Nec_V20
Neither you nor our story teller debugged the system in question. You can't even be sure mucking with the page file actually was the fix. It certainly could have been one big coincidence.


OK, how about this instead: If the story is true ...


It might be my autism (I have Asperger's) which prevents me from seeing something which is obvious to the pair of you "normals", but what possible reason would I have for making up a story?

Recounting a personal anecdote is a far cry from telling a story.

If after several reboots, reinstalling drivers there is no improvement in a situation and the clearing of the virtual memory and one reboot does resolve the issue then it must have been one hell of a coincidence. If it were only once or twice that doing this resolved issues then again there might be other reasons. However when I have applied this very simple process and it has been effective hundreds of times then I will stick with it as a first step towards fixing an issue which doesn't have an otherwise obvious cause. The pair of you can obviously do whatever makes you happy.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 7:25 am
by flip-mode
Forge wrote:
You can't budget 200$? Bummer. I did, and it's pretty awesome.


Meh, condescension isn't very helpful. Who knows what else is on his budget. I can list you at least ten items that cost $200 or more that are on my want list. 32 GB is one of those items, but it's not at the top of the list, so - no - some of us can't budget $200 for computer memory. :wink:

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 9:20 am
by Nec_V20
flip-mode,

flip-mode wrote:
Forge wrote:
You can't budget 200$? Bummer. I did, and it's pretty awesome.


Meh, condescension isn't very helpful. Who knows what else is on his budget. I can list you at least ten items that cost $200 or more that are on my want list. 32 GB is one of those items, but it's not at the top of the list, so - no - some of us can't budget $200 for computer memory. :wink:


My latest outlay was to extend the use of my computer and comms equipment for an effective 20 hours with a UPS in case of a power cut.

Sounds easy but it is difficult to do safely (most of the "How To's" out there are just invitations to a Darwin Award) and I came in at $335 for the APC UPS and the rest.

Tested it a few days ago and had the machine (computer, monitor, router and modem) running for 10 hours on the UPS. I put everything back the way it was and the UPS is none the worse for wear.

So yes there are other things one prioritises and I can appreciate the difference between a "Nice to have", a "Want to have", and above all a "Need to have".

Sadly, others cannot.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 10:53 am
by Forge
Nec_V20 wrote:
flip-mode,

My latest outlay was to extend the use of my computer and comms equipment for an effective 20 hours with a UPS.


You routinely have power outages extending for 10-20 hours? That must be hell on your food refrigeration/freezer equipment. I'd probably look into a whole-house diesel generator unit at that point.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 3:52 pm
by Nec_V20
Forge wrote:
Nec_V20 wrote:
flip-mode,

My latest outlay was to extend the use of my computer and comms equipment for an effective 20 hours with a UPS.


You routinely have power outages extending for 10-20 hours? That must be hell on your food refrigeration/freezer equipment. I'd probably look into a whole-house diesel generator unit at that point.


I have a petrol generator, however, living in the town, I cannot use it in the evening or at night.

I have had a couple of power outages where I live and of course they always happened at the worst possible time and they were extensive. The outages are by no means routine.

There are two and only two universal guiding principles - regardless of what religion of lack of it you are:

1) Murphy's Law (or Sod's Law) - "Anything which can go wrong will".

2) Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

By being prepared for the next power outage and having a redundant power supply in place I can use Murphy's Law to my advantage, i.e. a power outage is a lot less likely to happen.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 8:12 pm
by ALIAS
the only reason I went with 16Gb of ram is because I got some 8Gb of G.Skill DDR-1600 CL9 memory for $50 in some combo deal from newegg 2+ years ago. then they had the same memory on sale for $25 a few months ago so bought 8 more GB. So now I have 16 GB of ram which I paid $75 for. That same memory is selling for $77 on newegg right now for 8 GB.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2013 10:08 am
by dme123
Nec_V20 wrote:
Forge wrote:
Nec_V20 wrote:
flip-mode,

My latest outlay was to extend the use of my computer and comms equipment for an effective 20 hours with a UPS.


You routinely have power outages extending for 10-20 hours? That must be hell on your food refrigeration/freezer equipment. I'd probably look into a whole-house diesel generator unit at that point.


I have a petrol generator, however, living in the town, I cannot use it in the evening or at night.

I have had a couple of power outages where I live and of course they always happened at the worst possible time and they were extensive. The outages are by no means routine.

There are two and only two universal guiding principles - regardless of what religion of lack of it you are:

1) Murphy's Law (or Sod's Law) - "Anything which can go wrong will".

2) Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

By being prepared for the next power outage and having a redundant power supply in place I can use Murphy's Law to my advantage, i.e. a power outage is a lot less likely to happen.


I hope you've budgeted for regular battery replacement. Running and maintaining large UPS systems is more trouble than it's worth unless you really need them. I'd UPS my house for a laugh if I could get free equipment, but to spend a substantial sum to mitigate against a very small risk I can only assume the impact of a power loss in your home is enormous? To be honest if something happens to cause a 10 - 20 hours blackout you need to allow for the fact that connectivity and comms in your area are fairly likely to be down too.

In short, I'd guess you must either have a really bizarre usage case for a home user or you're a bit mental :D

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2013 10:36 am
by Scrotos
Nec_V20 wrote:
It might be my autism (I have Asperger's)...


Not no more you don't!

When it is released next year, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 is expected to combine the subgroups of Asperger's syndrome, pervasive developmental delay (PDD) and autistic disorder into one broad category—autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic. ... &t=1196571

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2013 10:39 am
by Scrotos
dme123 wrote:
I hope you've budgeted for regular battery replacement. Running and maintaining large UPS systems is more trouble than it's worth unless you really need them. I'd UPS my house for a laugh if I could get free equipment, but to spend a substantial sum to mitigate against a very small risk I can only assume the impact of a power loss in your home is enormous? To be honest if something happens to cause a 10 - 20 hours blackout you need to allow for the fact that connectivity and comms in your area are fairly likely to be down too.

In short, I'd guess you must either have a really bizarre usage case for a home user or you're a bit mental :D


For that runtime I assume he has a few deep cycle batteries hooked up in parallel to the UPS. With a trickle charge they should last 3 to 5 years, more if you get them hooked up to some specialized charging system like used by PulseTech. I agree that in the paranoia/utility seesaw it seems to tip more towards being paranoid about power loss than it is being very useful, but $250 or so every 5 years ain't a huge outlay for 20 hours runtime (assuming like 3 or 4 deep cycle batteries).

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 10:42 am
by Forge
Hi! Thread topic here. Just haven't heard from you guys in a while, thought I'd drop by. 16GB of RAM, remember?

And you should always buy as much ram as is practical financially. It never hurts and can always be used.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 11:00 am
by just brew it!
Forge wrote:
And you should always buy as much ram as is practical financially. It never hurts and can always be used.

Agreed. With one caveat: check your motherboard specs to see what the maximum amount of RAM it supports is. But even if you can't use it all now, if you buy when RAM prices are low you can stock up and use some of it in a future build.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 11:08 am
by Scrotos
Forge wrote:
Hi! Thread topic here. Just haven't heard from you guys in a while, thought I'd drop by. 16GB of RAM, remember?

And you should always buy as much ram as is practical financially. It never hurts and can always be used.


Oh, hey, your 32-bit OS just called. It wants to talk to you about how all that RAM can "always be used". Many of my customers (other businesses) still purchase and deploy 32-bit Windows for their employees to minimize compatibility issues with legacy programs and vendors they are required to use. Heck, major OEMs still sell it with Win7 downgrades just for this reason:

http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/ctoBas ... 24465%2E01

I agree with you in spirit, but that's a bad generalization to make about always being able to use more RAM.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 11:48 am
by derFunkenstein
My work-assigned notebook is a Latitude E5520 with a Sandy Bridge i5 and 8GB of RAM. It runs Windows 7 Pro 32-bit. So the "about" screen says 8GB (3.75 usable)

However, the topic of the thread is about someone building their own system. If the builder has half a functioning brain (MadManOriginal has at least that much) they'll use a 64-bit OS and therefore be able to address it all.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 11:56 am
by Captain Ned
Scrotos wrote:
Oh, hey, your 32-bit OS just called. It wants to talk to you about how all that RAM can "always be used". Many of my customers (other businesses) still purchase and deploy 32-bit Windows for their employees to minimize compatibility issues with legacy programs and vendors they are required to use. Heck, major OEMs still sell it with Win7 downgrades just for this reason:

In one sector of the day job I have to use a Lenovo laptop supplied to us by a Federal banking agency. It's running 32-bit Win7 and came with 8GB of RAM onboard. My (recently) new state-issue HP laptop came with 64-bit Win7 and 4GB onboard. A quick look-see found that both laptops were running the same spec RAM and 30 seconds later each laptop was much happier.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:54 pm
by Scrotos
Oh nice! Latest Fed drama was the Fed scaring our EUAC because TAAPS requires IE9 in 2014 and we better get on board or else nothing will work ever! Oh and we need new token software.

...yet Fed Advantage won't work in IE10 reliably due to the JavaScript they use but sometimes it might work in compatibility mode. I just wish they'd get their 500 divisions to get their rears in gear with IE support, especially with MS rolling the new versions out to unsuspecting small banks who don't know any better and install any updates. Bonus points for having FedPayments Manager use http://itextpdf.com/ to generate PDF reports but have it use the default size of A4 instead of Letter. Because, you know, the Fed primarily deals with Europeans and people who would use non-US page sizes. At least that's on their list of things to fix in the next release, however many years that will take. Sad, too, because JPMorgan Chase just did the same thing on their brand new website they rolled out. Good QA on that, fellas, especially since they have a per-user choice between Letter, A4, and Legal. Looks like that setting doesn't actually get applied anywhere.

...

In regards to the OP, if you read the thread, it looks like he already got the RAM 9 months ago in a post on the second page. Sometime between Jan 31st when he saw a Newegg sale and in March when he posted about what he got to someone else. So... I kinda think that ship sailed.

I upgraded two Dell XPS 8300 systems, stated max RAM is 16 GB but they can do 32 GB. With existing RAM I got a 32 GB kit split in two and have 20 GB in one and 20 GB (16 GB usable) in the other. Guess which runs Win 7 Pro and which runs Win 7 Home Premium? There's another case where more RAM cannot always be used due to OS limitation. And that also applies to a system builder making an OS choice.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:58 pm
by Captain Ned
I will never be convinced that FedLine Advantage is not a mistake compared to old-school FedLine. There's no reason whatsoever to pretty-up the wire transfer or ACH interface with GUI graphics.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:01 pm
by derFunkenstein

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:05 pm
by Scrotos
I thought the only difference was token versus certificate authentication. We use FedCommand (I think?) over our FedDirect line for ACH stuff and I'm not sure what we use Fed Advantage (which is also going over the FedDirect line) for. FedCash, backup ACH and wires, maybe to get some listing of ACH batches that we sent--print them off and put them in a file to store.

I was around for the final days of FedWire (?), I think it was. A dedicated old machine with sealed encryption cards (we found one the other day) and FLOPPIES as the only method for transferring wires to the Fed system. I think we were the last ones on that and went from there right to being the first successful deployment of FedDirect, something that apparently even the large banks hadn't figured out after more than a year of work on their part (I only heard that secondhand from the FedDirect technical people).

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:08 pm
by Scrotos
derFunkenstein wrote:


Ok. His problem was solved 9 months ago. Or are you talking about someone else in general? My information, like yours, is general information to help out anyone else looking into this. 'sides, he was wondering if Win8 would be a resource hog and 8 GB would be holding him back.

Re: any reason to get 16GB RAM?

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:17 pm
by Captain Ned
Scrotos:

FedLine taken to PM. YGPM.