I wish that more than a few days could pass without having to think about just what a crappy creation RAMBUS RDRAM RIMMs are.  Designed to help RAMBUS corner the market and make use of monopoly power, the RIMM spec died a fairly gruesome death over governmental anti-trust investigations and thanks to market forces when the memory buying public, and especially PC building geeks basically refused to buy systems that used RDRAM and instead stuck with SDRAM and other cheaper alternatives.

Unfortunately for me, we have a batch of systems at my 'day job' that use this RDRAM crap and sadly I get to look at PCs that could be very fast little boxes if they actually had some memory in them to work with.  I recently surveyed all of the systems on one part of our network and started gathering up information on which boxes should stay and which should potentially go.

Deciding factors are things like memory -- existing configuration and expandability; processor speed; disk space, and the like.

In the list of systems I have to work with are approximately 12 boxes made by the company with the big D, E, L and L in their name, all the same, all featuring lovely RDRAM in them.

Ugh.  Processor wise the boxes are fine.  Or at least fine enough for the types of tasks we'd need them for if we juggle hardware a bit (as we always do) and use the oldest/slowest for the simplest tasks while procuring heavy duty number crunchin' hardware to do that type of work.  Disk space, again, no problem.  Able to upgrade 'em to Windows XP (most are still using Windows 2000), yup, assuming that the memory is sufficent.  Oooops.

Back to that memory issue again.  Most of these boxes were purchased with a whoppin' 256MB of RAM.  Adding more was cost prohibitive (or so I guess, not having been there when they were purchased).  Adding more now is most certainly cost prohibitive and not worth it.  $200 (give or take) to add memory to a PC that has already lived past it's normal life span in the office place.  Pass.

So, we get to toss away hardware that should still be kickin' and beg for replacements out of the somewhat limited budget of IT money, because of stinkin' RDRAM and the costs of same.  Ugh.

Today's reminder of the crappiness of the RDRAM product line was my dad calling and inquiring about a PC that he saw in a thrift store.  He's sort of looking for a new PC to give to my nephew who is trying to get one going for computing classes at the nearby community college.  Unfortunately for him the PC that my dad used to have and has passed along to him is definitely long in the tooth and unable to run the software my nephew needs for his classes (things like Photoshop).  Pentium 3 class machine with 256 of RAM just doesn't cut it really.  Something faster definitely needed.

Anyway, dad found a sharp looking Dell Precision 340 workstation sitting in the thrift shop at a price that looked pretty good given the description of the product.  1.7GHz processor, plenty of disk space, with 17" monitor even included.  Under $200.00.  Also only 256MB of RAM with XP Pro already loaded on the box.  Yick.  Try running Photoshop on that box and you'd need to take about a million coffee breaks while the box thrashed the harddrive swapping in and out of virtual memory/swap space.

I checked from one of my favorite memory resellers and sure 'nuff, RDRAM.  Ugh.  Not a bargain at all.

So, that PC which was needing a home, and my nephew who could still use a reasonable PC for use for school won't be paired up after all.  Too bad.

Thanks for nothing RAMBUS.