I'm taking a stand!

[Aharami]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus

Originally posted by: Aharami

Originally posted by: purbeast0

Originally posted by: JohnAn2112
I hear ya. My work machine can grind to a halt sometimes. I'll click Reply in Outlook and I'll get the hourglass mouse cursor for a while. I just get up and get a glass of water when this happens.

Outlook is the biggest piece of crap. It takes like 5 seconds for me to do anything in it. If I reply, make a new one, hell, even expand it from the corner tray, it will take 5 seconds to resopnd. If I press the up key and move my current message to the one above it, it takes like 5 seconds to open it.

I do not understand how Outlook can be such a piece of crap.

i take it you've never used Lotus Notes? After having to use notes for the past 3 yrs, I'll gladly switch to outlook. Here's a sample scenario

New mail will come. I will click on said new mail. Hour glass will pop up. I will walk to the water cooler and fill up my 24oz glass with water. I will walk back to my desk. Hourglass will still be there. Will take another couple seconds before content of new mail shows up in preview pane.

:thumbsup: I had to use Lotus Notes for about a year and a half. I hated it. Outlook is so much better.

ah but there is a silver lining. rumor has it that we will be switching to outlook "soon"

 

[Homerboy]

SO what does OP do? If its actual, stereotypic office work, then 512 in XP is FINE.
If he's managing large databases, Excel sheets, or working in PS (or Adobe anything) then he needs more.
Without more info on the topic I will not cast my first stone.... but I my arm is certainly cocked and ready....

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: Accipiter22
Um what offices have you worked in?

Word, Excel, Email, etc (typical office programs) are not memory hogs. You do not need more than 128 MB for office programs. You could overload the user with things beyond office programs, but that isn't what I was talking about.

Windows XP runs quite well with no lag and 128 MB of memory and several office programs open at once. Office computers do not NEED Vista. Office computers don't need memory hogging programs. Offices worked quite well with 4 MB, 16 MB, etc in years past.

If he has programs that truely need 1 GB, it isn't an office machine. It is a workstation.

Uh, have you tried booting up with just virus scan and 128mb on XP? It takes forever. I've been in that world and I reformatted twice just to make sure my 128mb was fine. It's not fine. Switching to 512mb was heaven.

Then getting my Dothan 1.8 w/ 512mb was even a bigger heaven from my Athlon 1300.

Now even after reformatting and ditching Symantec for Kaspersky, my laptop is slow as hell compared to my Dual Core Opteron w/ 2gb.

512mb is FINE if you're not screwing around. It's fine for my laptop, and while FF is a little slow, I can do Office work fine. Would I like it to be faster? Sure. I ordered a 1gb stick for the reason, and it should be here anytime.

You shouldn't be annoyed at 512mb ram at work. It's not your personal system, and you have all the time in the world. Given you're moderately tech saavy, you're just aware of the time that's being wasted by waiting for your HD to page. I'm sure all the non tech people don't care. They just see this as typical tech stuff having to wait for the reply button to work (something I've never noticed even on my 512mb system).

I mean if you're worried in terms of work efficiency, I don't think you're at any other disadvantage unless the stuff you're doing requires a dual core system with 4gb of ram and all your coworkers are given that while you're still stuck on 512mb. Thus, you're on an equal level with everyone else.

 

[Geocentricity]

*yawn & twiddles on Inspiron 640m*

No idea why my line of work needs a dual-core w/ 2GB of ram

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

I just got a new machine with 4GB and dual-core

I was stuck with a ghetto 1GB P4 radiator for 2 years so I feel your pain :beer:

 

[paulxcook]

I'll join the Lotus Notes hating going on in this thread. Often I'll choose to reply to a message, and every piece of text in the application goes bold. Menu text, all typed text, text in old messages, everything. I have to restart it. Or sometimes it just hangs forever for no reason, so I have to kill the process and restart it. And it's so sloooooow. I used to think Outlook was bad, but I'd much prefer it to Lotus Notes. LN is garbage.

 

[child of wonder]

Man... my office computer has a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB RAM and it's still slow.

All I have open is Outlook 2003, IE7, Firefox, 2 instances of Putty, Winamp, and a remote desktop session to our billing server. The system loves to lock up at random.

38 processes running right now. Not that bad, but the system still chugs.

 

[Kraft Single]

Everyone at my company has dual screen. It's been an arms race lately. One dept is getting 3 screens and now the other depts wants 3 screens.

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Originally posted by: jhayx7
All of our computers come with 2gb of ram now. Only having 512mb of ram is complete rubbish. In my background I have this running:

Remote Deployment Agent
Software Inventory Agent
Security Expressions Agent
Norton AV Agent
Encryption Agent
Cisco Security Agent
Secure Pass

At least you haven't got Agent Smith in there as well...

/me prepares for rotten fruit bombardment

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: Kraft Single
Everyone at my company has dual screen. It's been an arms race lately. One dept is getting 3 screens and now the other depts wants 3 screens.

that is retarded. :roll: most people dont even know how to effectively use 2.

 

[NoMoMoney]

Yeah, using dual screens takes some skill. It's hard to minimize so much when someone walks into the office. 3.4 Dual Core here with 2 GB. We get new machines every 3 years here cause IT likes having the on-site warranty. I wasn't even complaining when I got this upgrade, they just showed up with it. The dual screen took some convincing, but not too bad.

 

[Kraft Single]

While we're on the subject of Dual Screens. I found a freeware alternative to Ultramon here.

We're a mortgage company switching over to the 'paperless' platform. Everyone looks at documents scans on one monitor and underwrite on the other monitor.

This one lady's monitor became unplugged and she told her manager she couldn't work and went home for the rest of the day. I just shook my head in disbelief.

EDIT: correct link.

 

[BurnItDwn]

We only have 512MB here
It sucks because one of the applications that we sometimes run 4+ simultanious copies of is "Buisness Objects." That app uses over 100MB of ram. I sometimes am able to use more than 1.5GB of swap. hehehehe

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Originally posted by: Kraft Single
This one lady's monitor became unplugged and she told her manager she couldn't work and went home for the rest of the day. I just shook my head in disbelief.

She should have come back to an empty desk.

 

[jman19]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: dquan97
XP + 2 excel + word + firefox + outlook + 512mb = pretty sad work day

I've done all that with 300+ page word files (with lots of graphs) and massive Excel files, and add in Powerpoint, on 128 MB no problem at all. You just need to learn to turn off useless other things (like desktop backgrounds, memory hogging disk caches, preloading software such as Adobe Reader, etc).

I work in an environment where I constantly need multiple excel, word, and powerpoint files open (all Office 2000), outlook, several IE windows, and a database editing tool open. Throw in the virus scanner and 128 MB of memory would make for a pretty crappy work environment.

There is no reason at all NOT to have at least 1 GB of memory in an office machine. The RAM is cheap enough.

 

[elektrolokomotive]

Lenovo T60 w/2GB RAM. Dual monitors when I'm at my desk.

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by: purbeast0

Originally posted by: JohnAn2112
I hear ya. My work machine can grind to a halt sometimes. I'll click Reply in Outlook and I'll get the hourglass mouse cursor for a while. I just get up and get a glass of water when this happens.

Outlook is the biggest piece of crap. It takes like 5 seconds for me to do anything in it. If I reply, make a new one, hell, even expand it from the corner tray, it will take 5 seconds to resopnd. If I press the up key and move my current message to the one above it, it takes like 5 seconds to open it.

I do not understand how Outlook can be such a piece of crap.

I agree, it's as if MS deliberately put Wait routines behind every single task. I don't know what else it could possibly be doing with that many clock cycles.

OP, 512 is plenty for an office box, even on XP. It wasn't that long ago that 1GB was only for the super-hardcore, and 512MB was a standard gamer config.

Originally posted by: UNCjigga
Here we've got Integrity, TunnelGuard and OfficeScan all running in conjunction! Of course, the policies are so restrictive I can't even close the programs unless I terminate the process (at which point my ethernet connection ceases to function.)

Originally posted by: UNCjigga
I NEED to have (at a minimum) MS Outlook, MS PowerPoint, MS Project and MS Visio open at any time. I can close out the Word/Excel documents when I'm done with them but it isn't helping much.

Well OK, fine, your office sucks. Maybe you DO need more RAM.

 

[Firebot]

Add me to the Lotus Notes hate club. It's such horrible software, and the company changed to it since it apparently has better security then Outlook. Maybe it's more secure because hackers already feel sorry for the suckers stuck using it??

Why the heck is the default for replying to an e-mail, Reply with a blank e-mail?? Why can't I copy paste a simple attachment, or heck just simple text from a website without LN botching it up and making it uneditable? Why can't I recall a message? People bitching about Outlook don't know how good they have it.

 

[noluckjim]

Posting from an E6600 w/ 2GB machine running dual 30" Dells. Getting used to ONE 30" Dell takes a while, let alone 2!

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

If it needs to be just turn off all the eye-candy in Windows. I don't know what IT would say, but I worked IT myself, so I disabled services left and right =P

 

[Krazy4Real]

i guarantee you're not going to stop working. Get back to work while I laugh at you from my dual core system with dual LCDs and 2 gigs of ram.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: Firebot
Add me to the Lotus Notes hate club. It's such horrible software, and the company changed to it since it apparently has better security then Outlook. Maybe it's more secure because hackers already feel sorry for the suckers stuck using it??

Why the heck is the default for replying to an e-mail, Reply with a blank e-mail?? Why can't I copy paste a simple attachment, or heck just simple text from a website without LN botching it up and making it uneditable? Why can't I recall a message? People bitching about Outlook don't know how good they have it.

I know this is a bit off topic for the thread, but oh well

I went from pure Exchange/Outlook environment that I administered to a Domino/Notes environment that I will be backup admin for (hence why I'm in Detroit taking classes right now ) and I have no complaints. Notes is a much better collaboration tool, and if you have a good developer/designer Notes can handle all kinds of stuff Outlook could never think to do.

Our IT Helpdesk ticket system, timesheets, and many other apps are tied directly into Notes and it looks familiar to the people who have just been using it for email, so no learning curve.

 

[Fingolfin269]

512mb should be plenty for most office users.

 

[EKKC]

upgrade it yourself, make sure you label it your property, then when you leave take it apart and get it back, regardless of how worthless that RAM becomes in the future.

come review time pat yourself on the back or on the self appraisal of what you did

dont put your work on hold, that would backfire

/my 0.02

at the client im working at its the other way around, they gave me a brand spanking new T60 Thinkpad, c2D, 1GB RAM, 60GB, not the top notch but pretty decent, but listen to what they got on their managed environment: Windows 2000, IE5.5, office 2000, plus a total locked down environment (cant even right click on the task bar! command prompt is locked down) that is until i got somebody in IT that gave me Admin access. Wireless was disabled!

IE5.5!! Windows 2000! can't even see the two different cores! OMG!!!1!1!

 

[Atomic Playboy]

I have no sympathy for the OP. I'm the database admin for my department, and I'm stuck on (this is not a joke) a 7 year old Dell with a 933 MHz Pentium 3 and 256 MB of RAM. Everyone in the office has a computer from the last two years, including the computer illiterate woman who needs me to show her how to open documents, except for the one person whose entire job revolves around the computer (me). I offered to bring in an old computer from home and donate it so I could have a faster workstation, but it would violate our contract with Dell.

They claim I'm due for an upgrade this summer. I'd laugh if they meant another 256 MB RAM.