like i said, that was my opinion. But i went tru Dell stuff.. i still have like ~20ish machines from them running. The xw6400+ from HP is way better than Precision series i got here. Tower, way easier to work in the HP than Dell. the Dell tower is so bulky/big, but i think they changed the tower model last year. Hardware, i never had problems adding or switching a video card in a HP, conflicts with Dell... i got some of Dell's cheapest offering.. and it is the worst machines i've ever seen. Optiflex 170L to be precise. trying to add a PCI video card works on some.. and not on others [ talking about the Optiflex 170L ]. Last year, got the most expensive Dell laptop, technically an amazing machine [the M series] ~4-5k $ ... power supply died 3 times. But let me say that their customer service is pretty good, the local one [North America] like somebody mentionned. Just a few things that comes up to my mind this morning.
I have a little data on Dell vs HP desktops from my former company, where i was CIO. I bought about 50 dell desktops and 50 HP desktops. Typically they were ~$1000 with 4 GB of memory, decent CPU, but nothing fancy, After ~4 years, 5 of the Dells were still running. The rest were dead. After ~4 years, we had lost 2 HPs. The systems were all bought between 2003-2004. Quite a difference.
You must have been one unlucky SOB... NONE of mine have failed and ALL (or nearly all) of yours failed.
I do think that Dell had serious quality problems a few years ago. At home I just last week took my old Dell PII/400 MHZ offline - been running flawlessly for ~10 years. With Dell, I've found that it's best to buy the workstations, OptiPlex and high-end laptops.
According to your peak memory usage, your PC does not access to your first Gb of RAM... there are about 300 Mb free.. so why did you care to upgrade to 2 Gb? Aside this, is the Peak value the only indicator why we need to upgrade to more RAM than the current installed memory (escluding the cheap cost of DDR/DDR2)?
that screen shot is only an illustration of the TM. I have 4 GB on a Quad, and use a lot more than 2GB now. The Peak value is NOT the indicator that you need to upgrade your memory. The following situation will drive up the peak vaule: - During boot up time, or - the start up of certain application, or - during the operation of certain application, But as soon as the dust is settled, some of those temporary files are no longer needed, the memory will be freed for other operations. Peak value is a good first warning that you are running up against the limit. For most general computer usage (ie non-trading, non-time critical operations), you can run the memory OVER the physical amount you have, because the operating system will swap the idle service/apps to disk.
XP is efficient at managing physical memory and paging-out lower priority functions. Unless you're actually using >1GB of physical RAM, your rig will run as fast with 1GB as with 4GB.
So the question is the same: is the peak value that show me whether I'm using more than the physical RAM during a session and so I need at least a 2Gb upgrade ?
The Peak is a burst measure... most used at one time, even if only momentarily. Or, used at some other time in the session... like if you were running Photoshop and now are not. At various times during your session, check Task Manager and see how much there is shown as "Available". That indicates how much RAM is "at the ready" for whatever demands are made. If that's 200MB-ish or more, adding more RAM will not do anything except lighten your wallet.
You might run into a lot of compatibilitiy issues if you go 64bit. Of course that depends on what software you use but chances are down the road you would run into a piece of software you must have that doesn't support 64 bit. My solution is to go for windows 2003 server enterprise edition. It's 32 bit but supports up to 32GB of memory using Physical Address Extension (4bits extra for addressing). Windows 2003 server has the same core as windows XP and software compatibility is excellent. Unless the software you use is specifically designed not to support windows server (such as antivirus software, they make you pay more for server OS) you're unlikely to run into compatibility problem. I bought a Dell 2900 server with windows 2003 server enterprise for trading purpose and is very happy with this configuration. Windos 2003 server enterprise cost an arm and cost as much money as the server hardware but I think it's well worth the money.