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     Today we are going to tackle that troubling question that keeps coming up ever 6 months or so; "Just how much memory do I need?". As always, this depends entirely on what you do from day to day on your computer. Do you just work on research and book report for school? Do you just surf the net? Are you into digital music? Digital video? Are you into games? What type of games? Of course the answers to these questions can change depending on what operating system you are using, so we'll just stick with the most popular; Windows XP.

     Now since we are sticking with Windows XP, we have a basic starting point. With thousands of hours of testing since XP first came out, I've come to the conclusion that any basic system running Windows XP really should have at least 512mb or RAM. That goes for net surfers and school work. Sure, you can run with less, but there is serious lag if you try to do anything beyond running the basic OS. As for digital music, 512mb seems to be enough unless you are editing music, then I recommend going with at least 1gb of RAM. As for editing digital video, as much RAM as you can afford along with a top end CPU, and a good video card is always the best, but you can get by with about 1gb of RAM. Again, more is always better. Now the big one, gaming. For the past year I've always recommended 1gb of good DDR or DDR2. No more, no less. That was until I started playing new games like Doom 3, Half Life 2, and now Battlefield 2. While Doom 3 was more graphics card intensive, it also needed a ton of RAM. Half Life 2 wasn't too graphics card intensive, but it still required a lot of RAM to run smooth. As for Battlefield 2, it seems that this game is all about the RAM. I've been playing Battlefield 2 on a regular basis since it came out and there is clearly a lag problem with this game, even with the graphics settings tamed down on an ATi X850XT PE. On line play is even worse, Gb network or not. This is because many or most of the maps are serious memory hogs. I'm talking 1gb loads and more. Knowing this, 1Gb of RAM seems very insignificant. Time to double the amount of RAM in my system... So with that I ordered a 2Gb kit of PC2 4200 Gold Edition from OCZ. Will it make my BF2 issues go away or did I just waste a ton of money? Let's find out!

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