[Nathaniel Wolfson]

Well. I just got an eye-popper of exactly how leaky POTCO really is.

A fellow guild member of mine had been having problems with POTCO eventually just grinding to a halt. Her machine, Vista, and her memory? 512MB.

I knew the client was leaky, but the combination of that and Vista was Just Plain Awful. After getting her to buy 2 gigs of RAM (which her brother in law put in), she's now up and speedy as hell. She can sail, fight, whatever. And she hasn't had a lockup like this since.

Well, last week, I upgraded my laptop. In the interests of getting the biggest bang for the buck, I near-maxed the processor (T9300), the screen (15" WUXGA), and upgraded the battery and wireless.

I went with the minimum HD and RAM (80GB and 1GB), which I thought would be okay, as I'm running XP on it. The amount Lenovo (it's the T61p Mobile Workstation) wants for extra RAM is a bit out of line (and they only offer slower RAM, I can upgrade for less and get better-spec'ed RAM).

It's primarily a work machine, but POTCO runs ABSOFREAKINGLUTELY STUNNINGLY on it.

Anyhoo, I sat down to game tonight and was grinding along, levelling up (heck, even my system at home doesn't look quite this good, and it out-specs it). When all of the sudden I come to a grinding-donkey halt.

It got so bad that I had to kill the process.

HOWEVER, in the mean time, I got a look at it's memory usage.

663 megabytes.

I'm running SQL Server on this machine, and the only time it sucks down that much is when I'm running a bunch of SQL maintenance tasks simultaneously... And, unfortunately, the ONLY thing you can do is throw more RAM at it.

Never really noticed it on my rig at home (8GB of RAM).

Well, it looks like I'm going to be kicking more RAM into this baby earlier than I thought. Don't need the hard drive yet (luckily), as I have terabytes of space on my LAN at home to store files.