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.

Anything that uses huge amount of memory.

Furthermore, even if the program is disk based the cacheing of the memory can make a great speedup.

When it comes to PCs/Laptops, the more memory the better.

You just have to keep in mind, most operations systems (windows 32 bit - xp, etc)... don't utilize more than 3.5 gig...

Your 64 bit OSs will support more.

HP has workstation models (8510w and 8710w) that have optional 8GB of memory available for 1270$.

I know that. However, it seems to me that such a massive amount of memory is wasted in a platform whose disk I/O is usually pretty bottlenecked. (compared to the rest of the parts in the system).

As a business user, what differences would I see between Vista and Vista x64? What do the extra 32 bits do for me?

If you are just using Office, etc - you'd see better performance, but from other software apps, they may or may not run on 64 bit

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/win...c8a701033.mspx

A google search should provide more info.

In general, not much. If you *need* more than 4GB of memory, then you *need* a 64-bit OS. If like most people you're doing just fine with 1 or 2 GB, then more memory won't make things faster.

Any 32-bit app will run fine in an x64 environment thanks to thunking. Only 16-bit apps will truly not run, and odds of you running a 16-bit app these days are pretty slim.

Still, the above comments about the fact that you won't really notice a difference are accurate.

Make it slightly slower.

There is only one reason for 64 bit--it lets you go past the 4gb boundary. If you need that you need it, otherwise all you get out of it is a slightly bigger program.

Note that with 4gb on the board you might see a speedup from a 64-bit OS as otherwise something around 1gb of that memory is being thrown away.

Yeah, that's exactly why I am looking for more RAM. While it's not a big deal to make a remote connection to the desktop most of the time, I would much rather just have more RAM in the laptop and not worry about being able to connect to the desktop.


Looks like Dell Precision m6300 that chrisi1024 mentioned is the only option right now, so I may have to wait a bit.