| Marketing Weirdness |
October 10, 2000 |
by John s. krill
Everyone
knows you need a lot of memory to run any Windows operating
system. 64MBs is considered the absolute minimum. Almost all
system vendors now sell systems with 64MBs of memory. Well
someone forgot to tell this to Gateway.
In today's Orange County Register is an ad for a Gateway
GP-Series desktop. Good price: $899.00. This system was a
special deal because they are going to upgrade the monitor from
a 15-inch to 17-inch (15.9-inch viewable.) Now here I would like
to quote the ad:
A 17" monitor lets you simultaneously view and work on
spreadsheets, documents or Web pages. Plus, this free monitor
upgrade comes when you buy this Gateway(tm) GP7i-733se special
desktop, powered by an Intel Pentium processor. It's designed
to run even the most demanding business applications, so you
can be even more productive.
It does have a fast processor (733MHz) and a good size
monitor. So what's the problem? It comes with only 32MBs of
memory. It better have a super-fast disk drive because it will
spend a lot of time accessing the swap file as you work the all
those applications simultaneously. Will you be more productive?
In a word: No.
That fast processor and big monitor will only show good
results with lots of memory. More memory will almost always out
perform an increase in processor speed.
So read those ads carefully. What starts out as a good thing
may end with much frustration.
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