8GB and up for Laptop - Dell IdeaStorm

How IdeaStorm Works:

Accessories (Keyboards, etc.) Comments | Accessories (Keyboards, etc.) Ideas | Laptops Comments | Laptops Ideas

540

8GB and up for Laptop

540 points posted to Accessories (Keyboards, etc.), Laptops by cperng 04/20/07

The 2GB maximum memory is too little to do any real work in MS Vista OS, we need minimum 8GB and up for the laptop.

benjesuit 04/20/07	Yeah, I don't think spending twice the price of the laptop on memory makes economic sense.
premcv 04/20/07	Yup! Better still, switch to Ubuntu. ;)
hjwasson 04/20/07	4 GB of memory can be had on many newer models of Dell notebooks, including the M1210...if you have an extra grand you want to drop for 2 GB memory modules (increasing the purchase price by 30%). 4 GB is the most memory that can be easily addressed with 32-bit operating systems. You'd have to move to a 64-bit environment to address a larger range. What kind of work are you trying to do on your notebook computer, anyway? It sounds like your money would be better spent on a 64-bit desktop system!
premcv 04/20/07	or a Linux system for me. :)
hjwasson 04/20/07	I stand corrected - my Linux savvy friends tell me that Linux can handle up to 32 GB, even on 32-bit systems! Still, I'm trying to envision the needs for so much RAM on a notebook computer, and the cost in terms of both money and battery life!
premcv 04/20/07	Ubuntu for me anytime!
jmecc 04/20/07	No linux 32-bit can't handle ove 4GB of ram. No 32-bit OS ever will. 2^32 addresses is 4,294,967,296 addresses, i.e. keep track of 4GB. Right now 1GB works fine for Vista, 2GB if you do scientific work or photoshoping. 4GB is the ridiculous frivolousness you see with folks who think more must be better. 8GB is for a nice server with hundreds of users, not for a laptop!!!
cosh 04/20/07	Linux has been 64-bit ready for years and years though. What sort of nutter buys 8 GiB of RAM???????????????
beckster 04/21/07	I haven't seen any review state, "1GB works fine for Vista". Everything I've read said 1G is the minimum necessary to get Vista to function. 2G is necessary to make Vista work like it is supposed to.
cosh 04/21/07	And I have seen reviews stating that it runs fine with 512 MiB, but much better with 1 GiB.
hjwasson 04/23/07	My understanding of memory addressing limits was the same as jmecc's, until the Linux guru's in my office expanded my knowledge. The 32-bit Linux kernel plays some memory addressing games to address a larger amount of memory (up to 32 GB). I would think this would cause a big performance hit, but the Linux converts swear not. You can learn a little more about it here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450?page=1 I've thought about the "more RAM" suggestion for a while, and have concluded that it would be nice if higher performance notebooks could address more memory. If the notebooks had more DIMM slots, then less expensive RAM modules could be added as needed. While most of us would be fine with lower amounts of memory, there are certainly uses that could require a lot of RAM. I run virtual OS's with VMware, and 2 GB is not enough when doing that. I imagine CAD or other applications might gobble up tons of RAM as well...but I'm still curious why cperng needs 8 GB!
joffe100 04/23/07	I have a 32GB Ram 8x dual-core 8way opteron system, SuSE 64bit server with 8x 145GB striped scratch drives and 1TB of raid storage, ner ner ne ner ner :-P I was lead to believe that it was all a combination of the chip, O/S, what you want to do with it and how you set it up... I had 8GB on 2 hyperthreaded xeons with Fedora Core 2 32bit - from what I could gather (without being an expert) was that the O/S saw and used the full 8GB but the Cpu's could not handle more than 4GB and so pushing more than 4GB was pointless anyway - unless you wanted to run different jobs with 4GB on each cpu (with some room for background apps) - windows saw 4GB max irrespective... I have to learn node management next....
premcv 04/24/07	Oh, wow! 32g ram? Phew!
hjwasson 04/24/07	LOL! Using a server as a personal workstation sounds cool...but aren't you wasting a lot of power (both in terms of power draw & unused processing)? And I can only imagine what kind of sound levels you have to put up with - unless you have everything water-cooled? Or maybe you keep that monster in another room? ;-) In any case, I bow to your performance machine - and can only drool.
premcv 04/24/07	Is it water cooled? Tremendous power...!
cosh 04/24/07	Wow even I'd be impressed by a water-cooled 32 GiB personal server... and I'm a DOS and 640k sort of person.
premcv 04/24/07	Those were the days of the 640k! ;)
joffe100 04/24/07	haha nah, it's used for doing FEA calculations to simulate extruding metal - hidden in sound-proofed air-cooled room with 2 fans per cpu, it's got the new low wattage opterons - still trying to get my head around cpu/ram management and programming linux for parallel computing - all very cool stuff unless you get stuck on memory crashes that don't make sense (weeks of hair pulling when I started to figure out what was going on) - no grpahics so I cant sneak in and play Halo on the weekends :( lol
thejedimaster 04/25/07	4GB option on all 15" and up..
hjwasson 04/25/07	LOL! Joffe, that's sounds like cool & very technical work, and I appreciate your input regarding large memory addressing to this discussion. 32 GB of RAM and optimizing 8-way multiprocessing sounds like a real challenge. However, I think we need to get the discussion back on topic - cperng was wanting 8 GB and up on notebook/laptop computers. That led me to wonder what he needed so much RAM in a laptop for!
premcv 04/25/07	:)
jrelyea 08/13/07	Anyone who does an extensive amount of work using Viirtual PC/Server or VMWare Workstation for app testing, development, packaging, application virtualization etc knows just how little 2g or 3g (32bit) of RAM goes.... Going with 4g helps, but not at necessarily at the expense of tossing hardware in the trash becuase of no drvers (I don't have any broadband wireless or wireless LAN drivers with any 64bit OS)
ttynjala 08/28/07	One may correctly redicule the idea of 8Gb laptop for ordinary office/home work but seriously the truth is that there allready exists a market for laptops higher than 4Gb memory capacity. For example I'm working in a company dealing with simulation stuff and if we could have found such laptop with reasonable price we would have purchased rightaway several of those. Of course this would require use of 64bit OS but then REAL MEN already use 64bit operating systems anyway. Only pantsies and weenies bother to play with 32bit little stuff :) It's quite irritating having to get a laptop with 32bit vista and then having to replace it with 64bit version (and going through all the trouble with drivers) just because it's still not sold preinstalled.
davmcn 08/28/07	Don't Agree with yah there ttynjala.
howlingmadhowie 08/28/07	linux can handle 64GB on pae-enabled 32-bit systems. pae technology was introduced with the pentium mmx and enables another (4bit) layer in the paging tables only viewable by the operating system, but not by an application. it is therefore part of the hardware. the operating system only has to support it. windows vista can only handle 4GB (minus variable space for io). 64-bit vista supports variable amounts of ram dependent on the version of vista you buy. linux compiled for amd64 supports the maximum address size on the amd64 (48-bit=256TB). i hope this clears things up. personally, i would love a powerful laptop for when i don't have an ethernet connection to my server. i sometimes work with datasets larger than 4GB.
joffe100 09/05/07	why on earth use a laptop for simulation - I use my laptop (2GB dual core 32bit XP Precision M90) to handle the graphical side of business - more than adequate for multiple sessions of graphics hungry simulations and CAE progs (even parallelized 2nd order tetrahedral solid meshing with 1.5 million degrees of freedom and pretty colours!)- I dump the math on the server, this way no compromising on performance, does of course entail buying a laptop and server..... but I figure gone are the days of high powered work stations anyway. 32bit is just fine for basic codes and small jobs and probably will be the case for a couple of years (hmmm maybe I shouldn't tell my boss this, I'd lose the justification to put games on the laptop too...) I can't see it hitting the wall unless my models reach 15 million DoFs but even the analysis code can't deal with that yet anyway, and won't realistically for another 18months and by that time I'd need a new laptop with maybe 4Gb.
poupa 11/24/07	I build 64 bit ARX applications on AutoCAD for highly complex micro electrical devices, The shaped based net list analyzer now runs up to 5 GB in a box. The new M6300 chip set can hold 8GB, why can't they do it?
hjwasson 12/01/07	I'm sure that 8 GB of RAM will eventually become options on notebooks. It's the nature of the industry to keep expanding capacity. I don't understand why all the vendors only have 2 DIMM slots - if there were 4, you could get 4 GB using inexpensive 1 GB DIMM modules, and get your desired 8 GB using the still expensive 2 GB DIMM modules.
arvitis 12/15/07	it will able only some years
race2255 12/25/07	We NEED more than 4GB in a laptop. I run VMWARE and need to host 3-5 virtual machines simultaneously PLUS the host. The perfect scenario would be to keep my host clean with ONLY the 64-bit OS installed, run one virtual machine with my personal stuff on it, another for miscellaneous stuff, and 2-3 for work-related test environments. Please make it happen. There is a decent market out here hungering for 8+ GB RAM laptops and we would be happy to pay a premium for it.
cosh 12/26/07	How can you possibly "NEED" to run 3 to 5 virtual machines at once?
aev Jan 19	Let's face it, for the person on the go a laptop has way more than enough horsepower but not enough memory. If my XPS M1710 could go to 8+gb I would do it in a heart beat. I did a training lab with 58 VM's for 3 classes of around 200 people. I wasted an entire quad 2650 for that class and could easily do it on this (M1710) core2 if I had 8+ gig. I just loaded 2008 build 6001 with hyper-V and it really worked well at 512 on the VM's but reducing to 384 was a little slow with 5 VM's running. So true a LAB means you have to load an infrastructure, AD, DNS, DHCP, SQL, SMS, etc..etc..etc.... Different subnets... you know LAB. True I could build a server for my office but then if my laptop had the memory I could use that at the client location.. um... like I do now. I vote for 8+
madjack Feb 16	As a software developer who spends a significant amount of time traveling, I, too would like a notebook with at least 8GB RAM capability. While high speed internet is usually available where I travel, it's often not fast enough to accommodate running Windows Remote Desktop back to the office. And if it's down, or I have a connection issue, I'm dead in the water. So when I travel, I take my entire development environment with me in a VMWare virtual machine image. That means the host needs its RAM to operate, which for Vista is really 1 - 2 GB. Then, the guest VM needs 4 - 6 GB RAM to run my development tools, an application server, and a database server IN ADDITION to the normal apps I run, including office productivity, e-mail client, browser, Skype, anti-virus, etc. The price for extra RAM is simply not that big of a deal anymore. For example, Crucial's selling 4GB SODIMM DDR2 PC2-6400 (2GBx2) RAM for $164, so 8GB in 4 chips would be under $350. (Okay, through Dell's memory upgrade configuration, that might be $800, but by now we all know not to do it that way, don't we?)
drpend Feb 19	I second madjack. I set up demo systems for high network software. The alternatives are remote connections that get blocked by firewalls and then suffer poor bandwidth or having to ship servers to site with advanced notice and have technical personnel show up to help the demonstration specialist do the demo. Just one of these can pay for two high end 8g laptops even counting the expensive memory upgrades from Dell. This doesn't even take in to account non-tangibles like being able to do a demo on few hours notice (verses a minimum 7 day lead time to ship and set up a server on site). Frankly at this point we are looking at trade offs as I still have two more servers to stage and we're already over the top on 4 gigs. I could use a 16 gig laptop with dual hard drives.
wangrui Feb 29	Hi, I'm upgrading my desktop and still don't know what to buy. I only want to do text processing and I really need very large memory. For example, to build bi-gram dictionary from 8 million documents will exactly need 8GB memory. I saw one of you guys have a desktop with 32GB memory. How can you do that? I also want to buy such a powerful machine. But the lastest P35 Intel chipset can only handle 8GB. I have surveyed the server solution. But the ECC memory is many times more expensive than non-ECC memory. To build a 32GB server, it will cost much more money than buy four 8GB desktops. I don't think server is reasonable solution. Does anyone know if it possible to have more than 8GB memory on a common PC? I don't really need fast memory access like 10GB/s. For me 15MB/s access speed is enough to do all I need. But everything must be put into memory because I need random access all the time. If use harddisk it will be a hundred time slower and the harddisk will crash very soon. I really need very large memory which don't need to be fast. I wonder if someone has the same requirement and can share some information, thanks
wallyhorse Feb 29	Does Intel (or AMD) even have a laptop motherboard that can support 8GB of RAM? Only when Dell can offer such motherboards with four slots (and for that, Dell may have to totally revamp the XPS 2010 and also perhaps introduce 19" laptops) will we see laptops that can offer 8GB of RAM.
wangrui Mar 1	I don't know laptop but for desktop it seems only G33, G35, P35, G964 support 8GB. I like G33 because it has a video chip which can be supported by 64bit Linux. But it's too hard to buy one. I just got back from market. Every decent G33, G35 motherboard have been sold out today. People are really crazy to get 8GB memory. It seems I need to wait for a long time until it's available in the market. For me, I don't need my CPU to be any faster. But I wish my computer can has as much memory as possible. But most chipsets can only support 2GB and 4GB memory. Only Intel and only several chipsets can support up to only 8GB. Why all chipsets are so suck in supporting memory! Is it really so hard?
wallyhorse Mar 1	It wasn't that long ago that motherboard even began supporting 4GB of RAM, and there are a lot of motherboards still sold that only support a maximum of 2GB of RAM. I see a lot of motherboards now that support 8GB of RAM (but you need 64-Bits) for those.
tad1214 Mar 5	Precision m6300 now supports 8 gb of ram.
wallyhorse Mar 5	Tad: I just went on Dell's site and looked at that, and no, it did NOT have an 8.0 GB option. I don't know if there is a laptop motherboard that can handle 8GB of RAM yet, though if you can stick a desktop motherboard and processor into the XPS 2010 (which probably is big enough to where it could handle such), then perhaps it could be done. Otherwise, 4GB looks to be the limit for laptops.
tad1214 Mar 6	http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/precn_m6300?c=us&cs=...~ NOW available with New Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo Processors, optional 512MB dedicated graphics, and 8GB Memory. Apparantly just not in the config yet. Give it a few days.
tad1214 Mar 6	My appologies, http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/precn_m6300?c=us&cs=...~
tad1214 Mar 6	http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=MLB103... has 8gb as a configurable option, must have a 64bit os to get the config option.
howlingmadhowie Mar 7	and it's available with red hat and a huge screen. i know what i'll be doing with my next paycheck :)
tad1214 Mar 11	My next 6 pay checks :-) But totally worth it.
eone May 3	Life on an airplane going from account to account doing consulting makes it difficult to have a functional AD / SQL / Exchange / Sharepoint environment to work against using Visual Studio. Throw an test client systems and some middle-tier servers and the only way I have been able to have it at availlable is to have a VMware server running at home 24/7 to which I RDP using a Verizon Wireless card. What happens when the client has a secure environment with no outside access. Everything slows way, way, way down. The notebook - 16gb would be great in a notebook to run a Vista/64 dev environment and VMware Workstation. I heard of an Engineering Notebook that comes with 8gb - I am starting to look at, but a Dell with 16gb would be great.
kanoneno May 13	Hi, I just found your posting I suggested the same thing only that it was for XPS M1730, but the idea is the same, taking advantage of 64 bit operating systems and apps. Please vote on my idea so that we can keep this going, I'll post a link to your idea in my suggestion. My idea is called: 8GB of RAM capacity on M1730. C'mon Dell, you already offer it in Precision M6300
tomsteele Jul 1	8GB on 'portable' laptops gets my vote. We use laptops to demonstrate our server application, which uses a big database and needs lots of memory to show best performance. Obviously we wouldn't deploy on a laptop but, for demonstrations, it's the best solution. Ideal for me would be an M4300, 8BG memory and keep the D/Bay - that let's us manage our demo disks centrally and we just slot in the version we want for a specific demo.
ms1974 Jul 1	I have a Dell Latitude D630 populated with 4GB RAM currently. I happened to notice that Kingston recently started releasing 4GB SODIMMS and according to their site, the Latitude D630 is capable of supporting 8GB (with a 64 bit OS obviously). So, I have ordered two 4GB SODIMMS and eagerly await their arrival... (as a precaution I also got written confirmation from Kingston to say they could be returned if the system did not register 8GB). FYI, this is the Kingston link: http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator_new/modelsinfo.asp?SysID=37240&m...
paulnielsensql Jul 14	Dell Documentation confirms that the D630 will accept 4Gb memory modules for a total of 8Gb http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latd630/en/UG/specs.htm#wp1105750
coolpj Jul 16	hey ms1974, did you have any luck with those 4 gb sodimms and d630?
paulnielsensql Jul 16	I have a maxed out D620 now - 4Gb RAM, 200Gb 7200rpm drive. I need the smaller 14 inch screen so I can work on planes. I use a 24" LG monitor in my office - dual monitor very nice. The D620 drives the external monitor at 1920x1200 very well. I'm tempted to buy a D630 for the 8Gb. BUT the Penryn moblie QUAD CORE is scheduled for release in Aug 2008 (wikipedia - search Intel Core 2), so it makes more sense to wait for the Core 2 Quad D640 w/8Gb RAM. and maybe a Samsung 256Gb SSD ?
coolpj 2 days ago	My D630 now runs on 8GB of memory (two 4GB chips supplied from kingston, KTD-INSP6000B/4G, the one recommended on their site for dell D630). The system is currently shipped with BIOS revision A12, and you won't be able to boot up your computer with two 4GB chips installed with this version. You need to update your BIOS to revision A13. You can get it from Dell's website. Oh, I almost forgot, you also need to have Vista 64 OS on your machine.

track comments for this idea

Please log in to post a comment

recently demoted by:

Status

IdeaStorm Team

Meet the Team!

How IdeaStorm Works:

Categories

Status

IdeaStorm Team