Now a days, laptops are shrinking in size, on popular demand from the mobile, laptop lugging crowd. There are a slew of 10" laptop models available in the market from various manufacturers like Samsung, Acer, HP and so on.
I have found that most of these laptops which, by popular parlance are known as netbooks or mini notebooks, come with 1 GB of memory. And they are mostly powered by an energy efficient Intel Atom processor.
Around 4 years back (2005), Tom's Hardware did a research on how much memory an average computer user needs. And they concluded that 1 GB RAM is more than enough for most people's uses.
And now in 2009, their conclusion still holds true, I guess. You can run all the applications that a normal user will want to run - be it in Windows or Linux, in a PC or laptop which sports just 1 GB memory. Windows Vista doesn't count, as it is an aberration.
So have we really reached memory nirvana ? Or is another holy grail of an application going to be developed which ends up demanding more memory for it to run ?
Recently Google announced it's plans for rolling out a brand new operating system based on Google Chrome. If Google is to be believed, cloud computing is going to be the future for all end users. More and more applications are going to reside on a remote server and the end user will need little software installation at his end other than a web browser. This means the netbooks, laptops and PCs of end users will require far lesser memory than is required now to work at their optimal level.
How much memory does your computer have ? How much do you think you need for doing your stuff on the computer ?
