There seems to be (not here, but just in general) a misinformed idea that faster processor speed is always better, and more memory is always better, and bigger hard disk is always better. The important thing is to find where, if anywhere, your system will have a bottleneck. You can put in a zillion GB of memory, but if the memory is not operating at the right speed for your computer's bus, you're making a mistake. Likewise, if your hard disk is not capable of high enough speeds, you can have all that memory or all that processor power, but whenever you do disk-intensive stuff, all that processor power and memory are going to be sitting around waiting for disk access to occur. And same thing with processor power; for some applications, the limiting factor is the the bus speed, and the extra processor power isn't going to help you.
A computer is a system that needs to be harmonized, all the components need to be balanced with the others so you don't have any power being wasted. It's like, you can take the engine out of a Ferrari and stick it into the body from a Suzuki Samurai. You're not going to get anywhere near the use out of that engine that you could.
This memory thing, 8GB, it sounds kinda over the top. I've never come close to using that much memory, in any application. The funny thing to me is, the computers that I use to do the hardcore data crunching for my job, they generally have 2GB or 4GB depending on when they were bought. And the programs that we use for the data crunching generally won't take advantage of anything beyond about 100MB of memory. The bottleneck there is the processor, which will run at 100% to the point where other applications stop responding or will take 30 seconds or two minutes to wake up while this program is crunching. You could add another GB or 10, and it wouldn't do jack.
In that case, the answer (aside from getting this other company to rewrite the program, which is already happening) is to split the processing across as many machines as possible, and let them each run at 100%.
Something really hilarious is that all these new PC's have duo core or quad core processors. And if you're doing anything that's computationally intensive, having your machine acting like two or four separate processors will make everything take much longer to do. The first thing I do anytime we get new CPU's for my work stuff is to tell the IT guy to go in there and disable the multithreading capability. If you're doing computationally intense stuff, that will make the computer work much better, faster. Those multi-core processors are only really good for doing lots of different stuff at the same time, like checking email and surfing porn and rendering video or whatever it is people are supposed to be doing.
I personally think bus speed is the single most important factor in the performance of a PC, and the harmonization of the memory, disk, and processor to all work optimally at that bus speed.
"The bastards have landed"
www.myspace.com/thechromerobes - now has a couple songs from the new album
