Better watch it when you say NO ONE... What about the engineer running photo editing and CadCam software while also trading off of his 6 x 19" LCD trading platform on the side? What about THAT guy, huh? I bet he could use 4Gig!
While I might agree that this is a candidate for more RAM, you would never design, base or cater to 1% (or less) of a market for sound overall expansion plans. And even that user would have that two minutes or so of resource conflict as the odd moment. I'd personally assign his resource priorities to lean toward his trading. Rendering is not so realtime critical. When we are all sitting around glowing at the future 20 gig RAM systems (coming) there will still be that 1% that just must have...
The answer to this question turns out to be more complicated than I thought at first. Basically, it depends on what you are doing. For example, for the stuff that I am doing now, I need about 4MBit/sec connection sustained. So you would think that a fat cable connection of 6MB/356kb of bandwidth would do the trick. It turns out that the asymmetric part of that connection would be nowhere near enough, and even 1.5Mb/768kb would be FAR better than 3.5MB/356kb. FWIW, if you are just trading and getting charts and running realtime tickers for a few hundred symbols, symmetric 768/768 DSL is fine for about 99.5% of the people that visit this board. nitro