Charles on… anything that comes along

So I think that I need some more RAM, because the 1GB presently sitting in my Powerbook is in effect only 512MB, because NetNewsWire eats up half of it usually while just sitting there doing nothing.

I’m seriously thinking that I have to reduce the number of articles I keep in NNW - presently 307,823 articles in 527 subscriptions, excluding smart lists, which are distillations of headlines from those subscriptions - because it’s whacking the machine. If I quit NNW, I get my machine back. But then I can’t do the things I want to do with it, like searches over the past months or years. (Then again, are those searches useful? If you can’t carry them out, perhaps not.)

Anyway, I thought that one solution might be to buy some more RAM. Here’s the page at Crucial where you can pick RAM for Powerbooks like mine.

But just look at the prices. The red line is how you’d expect it to go; the blue line, what it does. Want a 256MB strip? (Naah.) That’s just £18.79 (inc VAT).

How about 512MB (which I already have)? £36.41, or 93% more expensive than the 256MB strip. The more you buy, the cheaper it gets!

OK, then, a 1GB strip (which would take me up to 1.5GB)? Ah, £129.24. What?? That’s 3.5x more expensive than the 512MB strip for twice the RAM! Or 6.8x the price of the 256MB strip for 4x the memory.

If this were following the trend of the first two items then the 1GB strip would cost about £70. But as you can see, it doesn’t. Something exponential happens to the price. But why? This isn’t cutting-edge RAM any more (is it? DDR PC2700? I thought that was getting on to being ancient and commoditised). Please, someone explain it to me.

Of course, if you could tell me how to get back all the utility of my machine without buying more memory and without dumping NetNewsWire, I’d be glad of that too. Especially if it costs less than £129.24 + p&p.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• NetNewsWire 2.0 beta: it's an aggregator! It's a browser! It's *fantastic*! (22 September 2004; score: 52.9%)
• CSS twiddle means more readable in XP? (11 August 2005; score: 43.02%)
• Two techie things I'd like to do but can't - can you? (27 June 2005; score: 36.9%)