>The question still remains -- is the RAM worth it? We can end up almost within hardware budget if we get the 512 Meg of RAM, and go about 50% over hardware budget if go to 1 Gig of Ram. But hardware cost is trivial compared to developer cost, and the cost of having to wait a long time for jobs to finish. So if the Gig will buy us something real, I have no problem fighting for it. That is the question. Will the Gig get us improved speed. The only thing I know on this is that Microsoft says the more RAM the better, and some people on this thread have added that RAM only does you good if your chip can access it directly. (Most modern chips and motherboards can.)

Given the other hardware you've spec'd, I'm surprised the RAM cost is such a big issue. A local dealer quotes PC100 ECC SDRAM at C$410 for a 256MB piece... so $820 for 512MB, or about US$550. Assuming the MB/CPU properly support that much RAM, it won't be slower than not having it. Hey, why not try it and tell us the results? :-)

IAC it's going to be more important to optimize your VFP programs for peak speed.

I'd look a little more closely at Jim's point about networking. You need to ask yourself - you're going to be processing GB-sized files on this machine. How are you going to get them onto this machine? It can take a *long* time to push files of that size around.