This editorial grew out of two separate situations.  The first train of thought came from my Sempron review, where I wrote about how budget CPU performance is significantly better than benchmarks imply and discussed the difficulty manufacturers have in demonstrating ?good enough? performance.  The second came from a problem a friend of mine was having last night.

Specifically, her notebook (an AMD 1800+ model with 512 meg of RAM) was crashing randomly.  I asked her to reboot and tell me how much RAM was free in the system?and was surprised to hear she had only 90 meg of RAM free after boot for running software.  I was even more surprised to hear that there was (so far as I could tell remotely) any spyware installed on the system.  No, she had only a standard suite of applications installed plus a few known RAM pigs?Trillian, Norton 2004, and Netscape among them. 

This got me wondering just how much RAM a modern system needs for basic functioning given the crap an OEM loads it with.  I headed off to Dell, where I discovered that a typical system is now loaded with:

• Paint Shop Pro (Trial Version)
• Dell Jukebox (powered by MusicMatch).
• RecordNow! (CD / DVD burning software)
• Office 2003 (if you choose it)
• Norton Internet Security 2004.
• AOL 9.0

So, I decided to have a little fun and test just how much RAM bloat occurs from these various pieces of software.  Here?s what I found:

A fresh WindowsXP Professional installation booted on 512 meg of RAM has roughly 407 meg free after boot.  Here?s the RAM usage of the following programs:

Norton Internet Security:  42 meg.
MusicMatch Jukebox (tray only):  3 meg.
MusicMatch Jukebox (open, NOT playing):  51 meg.
AOL 9.0 (tray):  29.2 meg!
AOL 9.0 (signed on):  88 meg.!!

If we turn on Word, MusicMatch, and AOL at the same time we end up with 230 meg of RAM free out of 512 total.  Keep in mind we aren?t actually surfing the web yet, typing anything, or playing any music?that?s just the cost of having the window open.  And, of course, if you had integrated video, you can knock another 32-64 meg of RAM off that 230, for a total between 198 and 166.

Why is this a problem?  Because most budget systems don?t sell with 512 meg of RAM.  A fair number of Dells?, in fact, don?t even sell with 256 meg of RAM.  Dell defines 128 meg as the amount an ?average? system has, even though Microsoft states that this is a minimum for JUST WindowsXP.  Just check their system configurators. 

next >

---

• Conclusion. (1 of 1)