>"Name-brand" RAM is a crock - these days anyone in that business has one or more billion-dollar fabs, and total quality control is the only way to make them pay. What do you consider "name-brand"? Dell? Compaq? Neither of those has any fabs, they buy all their semiconductors from others.
>
There is such a thing as name-brand memory - just not under these names. ;-)
There are RAM vendors who do their own fab and QC - Micron Electronics is one of them, and the best retail source for their product is Crucial Memories, a branch of the compnay that deals with the retail marketplace. Viking is one of the few non-fab vendors that does extensive QC of the product they assemble and sell, and I'd be willing to pay a slight premium for their product as well. A number of small integrators such as MIND Computing and PC Nut will spec an exact part and performance guarentee.
I'd expand on your advice - get the exact details of what 'name-brand' means in this context, and if all it means is that it came from the primary system assembly plant, I'd go for a real name-brand, performance spec'd part unless the memory that came from the OEM carried extensive addded warranties - a real consideration in some cases, where if you get a 24/7 contract and something breaks, the first thing a tech from their operation may do is to rip out anything that didn't come from the primary vendor.
>>Our network is optimized fairly well now. We can copy a 1 gig file from machine to machine in about 15 minutes. Getting the files onto our network is a another matter. FTP is obviously not an option. Our client does have compression software and writeable CD Rom drives, so one possiblity is to have them compress the data and put it on CD Rom. (A gig file compressed will fit easily on a CD Rom drive. There is a lot of empty space in dbf files, and compression usually reduces them to about 20% of uncompressed size). Since our client is local, they should have no problem getting the CDs to us.
>
>Yep, at a buck a shot a CD-R is going to be tough to beat here.
