Did You Miss the Memory Boat?

A great scene from the "Pursuit of Happiness" movie is when the little boy tells his dad a joke while they're walking along the roadway, lugging the $250 bone density scanner that dad has to market so they can survive.

The joke goes like this: A man is struggling in a river flood and a boat comes by asking if they can help him and he says, "No, I believe in the Lord, and He will save me." So that boat moves on. A few minutes later a different boat comes by and says, "Let us help you," and again he says, "No, I believe in the Lord, and He will save me." So they, too, move on. Well, He drowns. A few minutes later when he's at the pearly gates of heaven he asks "Lord, why didn't you save me?" The Lord said, "I sent two boats!" The point is we do not always recognize things for what they are.

Well, we may have missed the memory boat. After a couple of years of very inexpensive memory prices, after a few years of much higher prices, prices are on the rise again.

This increase is caused by the large adoption of DDR3-style memory, a massive shift in manufacturing to DDR3 memory by makers, and an economic downturn that caused companies to re-evaluate how they operate.

As one of my memory suppliers, Connie, wrote: "As the economy begins to pick up, we are finding that the demand is greater than the supply. Manufacturers have converted to building DDR3, causing supplies to tighten on DDR and DDR2. This uphill trend is not expected to end any time soon. I read one article that said it was expected to keep going up over the next two years. When the economy slowed down, the manufacturers closed down some of their facilities. Now they are not able to keep up with demand."

The shame of this is that memory is probably the one, single, best item a computer user can add to or have in his system to increase overall system performance and total productivity. Windows uses lots of memory when starting up, opening multiple windows, running tasks, and closing down. Linux operating systems do not need as much as Windows to work well, but again, the more the better.

Things go faster and better with the maximum amount of memory you can afford to put into a system. A faster processor will not really make that much difference if you're still at 256 meg or 512 meg of RAM in a four-year-old or older system, for instance. I still see machines coming in for service with this little memory and see a huge difference in performance when I upgrade the RAM amount.

If you were to look back over the previous generation of mainboards and the chipsets on them, you would notice that the total amount of memory that these boards can recognise has increased considerably over the years, often limited by the operating system being used. Now today with Windows 7 released, we see a huge increase in 64-bit operating systems offered by all system builders, because it can address more memory than the 32-bit systems can, allowing the board to live up to its full potential. In general, the newer the chipset a board is made with, the more memory that board can potentially be populated with. Current destop boards from Intel can handle up to sixteen gig of RAM.

Now, that doesn't always mean that it's practical to populate the board to the max. It may be cost-ineffecient to do so. If a board can handle sixteen gig and there are only four slots for memory, that means you need to add four, four-gig RAM sticks to reach the potential. If a four-gig RAM module is three or four times the price of a two-gig module, it may be better to populate with four two-gig sticks for now and upgrade later.

The long-term problem with memory prices rising again is that it will add to the total cost of new systems. As the price of systems rises, manufacturers will try to cut costs by putting in only one two-gig module instead of two, and we will have this cycle of needing to add more memory all over again.

Another area that rising memory prices will affect, and most people don't think about, is video cards. They will also rise in price as the memory increases, causing systems to rise additionally if a graphics card is added by the manufacturer.

It's a vicious cycle, and I think the memory boat has now left the dock. I hope you were able to make a new purchase or do the needed upgrade before the last "all aboard" call was made.