Originally Posted by
ClueByFour
I'm curious as to what a laptop would need 8gb of RAM for, that would not be otherwise overly burdened by the nature of laptops to be relatively disk I/O bound?
People who do a lot of statistical analysis of huge data sets need all the memory they can get. Doing that sort of thing on a laptop is of course, not ideal, but in a pinch you have to make do with what you have or can get.
I support a number of folks who do this sort of thing and have office computers with 16+ GB of RAM in them. While they'd like to have that much power in a mobile computer, what they usually end up doing is remoting-in to their desktop computer to do anything intensive.