I put some extra RAM into a friend’s laptop over the weekend. A lame dog with 256Mb, it now runs like a dream with 1.2Gb.
I am flabbergasted that Dell would sell a Windows XP laptop with only 256Mb of RAM. Sure, that is Microsoft’s published minimum requirement for XP; which of course, is the barest minimum it will take for the operating system to start up.
“What do you mean you want to run stuff on top of the operating system?!”
This sort of practice is just stupid; classic short-term thinking at work. Surely there are smart people working for Dell who get this?
My said friend, who like many customers is not a tech guru, truly believed that Dell made crappy computers. She thought she should have bought another brand, and was actually contemplating doing so. The AU$79 (retail including GST), 1 minute with a screwdriver, RAM upgrade changed all that.
How many customers out there have bought similarly under-configured laptops from Dell? How many of these customers subsequent decide against buying Dells for their businesses, or recommend against them to their friends, all in the mistaken belief that Dell laptops are unusably slow?
Does the trend continue today with Vista PCs selling with only 512Mb of RAM?
