It's amazing

the difference half a gig of memory can make. You'll remember that I wrote[^] a while ago about the memory requirements of Visual Studio 2005. This weekend, having some extra cash in hand, including the $390 I need to make my US citizenship application, I decided it was time to upgrade to a gig of memory.

That was a saga in itself. I might have some extra cash but that doesn't mean I want to splash it around. So I did the usual internet searches for who might have the best prices. Surprisingly that honour went to Frys Electronics. We have two outlets here in Phoenix. One is near the office way down south of Scottsdale, the other is a fair distance to the west. Being that it was a weekend and I certainly had no desire to go anywhere near the office I chose to go to the one on Thunderbird near 35th Avenue. I should have known better. Not only is parking there a bastard this time of the year but they didn't have what I wanted in stock. The next best price they had was way more than I was prepared to spend. So off to Best Buy. I had no expectation that they'd have a competitive price and so it proved; about $260 for a gig of memory.

Cutting a long story short, the best price I could find for a gig of PC2100 memory (my motherboard doesn't need and can't use anything faster) was $126 at OfficeMax. Uh huh; the local office supply shop about 2 miles away.

Just think about that for a moment you younguns. $126 for a gig of memory. Time was (said the old fart who read about it somewhere) that IBM used to be able to charge $10,000 a month to rent 4K of memory. And people would pay it! Indeed, my first computer (1977) had 256 bytes of memory that cost me about $40. Of course, back in those days we used to work 25 hours a day down the coal mines and walk 8 hours each way to and from work uphill in both directions!!!

Anyway, in a gig of memory Visual Studio 2005 is a pleasure to use. Snappy and responsive and I haven't run into any of the bugs I see reported here or at CodeProject. I have, however, run across one of my own. I'm working on an ATL COM project where the original project was created in VS2005. Every so often it gets to the point where it won't let me add a new ATL object using the wizards, reporting that one can only add such to projects enabled for MFC or ATL At this point if I reboot, reopen the project and try the same steps it works.

*shrug* it's still a helluva lot better than it was a decade ago.