Dave,

256MB is $40, 512MB is $127: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp?Mfr%2BProductline=Dell%2BInspiron&mfr=Dell&cat=RAM&model=Inspiron+8500+Series&submit=Go

MS requirements for VS .Net 2003: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/sysreqs/default.aspx

If you're running on XP Pro, take the 160MB minimum and double it (standard practice) to get 320MB. You should know from this, up-front, that 256MB isn't likely to be satisfactory. So, spec your new machine accordingly, or cough up the extra $40 and 5 minutes with a screwdriver.

You're probably just yanking my chain, anyways - did you actually just buy a new Dell notebook as a development machine with only 256MB RAM? Notebooks have such sluggish hard drives that lots of RAM is a requirement, paging out to disk is just too costly. I figure the extra I spent for 512MB 2 1/2 years ago on my current desktop has saved me more than 1/2 an hour of wait time so on that basis alone it's paid for itself.

I'm really just playing devil's advocate here - compared to paragons of virtue like PKZip/PKUnzip for DOS (42K and 27K respectively), Z80 CP/M (about 2K) or the SQL Slammer worm (300-odd bytes), any modern MS dev tool is not just a memory hog, it's an entire sty or feedlot. Sure, the scientist in me might be a bit offended. But the engineer says, no matter which way you grind 'em, it's still peanuts <g>

P.S. I just saw from another message in this thread that you did get 512MB in your new machine, so you were yanking my chain <g>. So 'fess up, what's the peak memory use you've seen on it?


>Al,
>
>Considering that you can't buy 24 mb of ram you really have to spend that 80 (this notebook to go from 256 to 512 is either $150 or $350 if you do it with 2 or 1 dimms) count at least 30 minutes of machine downtime to install the memory multiplied by the N developers in a shop it amounts to a lot more than $3.
>
>And yeah I consider it pretty much a hog to take 31mb just to get running. VC6 is a svelte 8mb like VFP8.
>
>On this box VFP8 is up and ready for command prompt input in 1 second. VS.Net2003 takes 9 seconds to start.
>
>>My point is that if you consider a memory "hog" to be a bad thing, what is the cost of that bad thing? As it turns out, not very much.
>>
>>>Al,
>>>
>>>The point was just that it is a memory hog, not how much the memory cost was. Doing something trivial in it the other day I had it up to 80mb.
>>>
>>>>512MB RAM from Crucial is $70-80. So, the extra 24MB is about $3.