When I did my last round of server and desktop deployments here at
the house[1], I tried to set up each of my servers (Windows Server
2003) with at least 256MB of RAM and each of the desktops (Windows XP
Pro) with 512MB. That may sound backwards, but I was working with what
I could scrounge and frankly, the desktops in this house do a lot more
work than the servers.
Ever since Steph’s computer died,
she’s been using the kids’ computers. Now, I’ve known for a while that
it is noticeably slower than our machines, but it does have the slower
processor, the motherboard has a slower front-side bus[2], the hard
drive is smaller and older (which means slower), and it had the least
powerful video card, so I didn’t think it terribly strange. Steph has
been complaining about it, and since she’s been using it regularly
while we wait for the parts to rebuild her machine, I finally decided
to take a look and see what I could do to speed it up — maybe defrag
the hard drive, run a spyware scan, that sort of thing.
It’s amazing how much faster it runs now.
[4] As long as you define “useful” as “Able to open Notepad by itself, within 30 seconds.”
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