I can't remember

You know, we've become victims of our own success. We've developed a culture of wanting more detail, more features, better graphics, more immersive experiences, and the cost... Memory. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to upgrade PC's that are running too slow because they don't have enough RAM installed. Also the number of 'new' devices that just don't work as well as they could because they are crippled by having a small amount of memory installed, or just plain bad memory management of the program that run on it. But take a case in point. I'm running a modest PC with a 2.4Ghz processor, half decent graphics card, but a game that graphically can run without any problems at all, is crippled by the system 'only' having 512Mb Ram installed when there's more than half a dozen objects on screen to render. This is on a system running Windows XP, which by Microsoft's own admission only needs 128Mb installed to run happily (you see why I haven't upgraded to Windows 7 or even Vista yet!). OK, I'm kind of lamenting the demise of a time where more memory simply wasn't available, where programmers had to put a limit on their imagination or come up with new and interesting ways of making the most of the memory they likely had available to them to achieve the results they were dreaming of. I'm also lamenting the fact that I've yet again come to the point when I need to cram as much memory into the slots available that this poor creaking motherboard can handle. Now we're all at the mercy of memory manufacturers who hold a world captive of a public whose demand for ever more gigabytes is pushing the cost of memory up, and older memory costs double or even triple what it would have when it was at it's peak.

These are probably the grumblings of a disgruntled PC user and Gamer frantically trying to keep up with the pace of progress. But you wonder how long this is going to be sustainable for. There's probably hardware and software developers working with platforms we can only dream about. And when the dream becomes a reality we're all left scrabbling to catch up!