Good to know I'm not the only programmer who never learned to type properly! In my case I'd written dozens of stories on the computer before they started typing lessons at school (around gr. 3), and by then I was too comfortable with my own way to see the point in switching to theirs. But I'm pretty fast for a hunt-and-pecker :)

Tom's Hardware did an article on this a while ago: Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM? . They found that for pretty much everything they tested for, there was almost no appreciable difference between 3GB and anything more than that. I suppose I could see adding a couple extra GB for a server, or if you're going to be using virtual machines a lot, but 12GB certainly seems like overkill to me. My desktop and laptop both have 3GB at the moment, and to be honest, I rarely ran out even when my desktop only had 1GB (though to be fair, I never really used Vista). 3GB is plenty for me for the time being.

I'm female, and all my computers have male names (Daedalus, Synergy, Kakos, Copernicus, Prometheus, and Asimov). They all have to have unique identifiers to be on the network anyway, so they might as well have actual names rather than being called main-desktop, main-laptop, etc. Having names for them also makes referring to them in conversation much easier, as I don't have to rattle off their purposes and specifications instead. Besides, people always named their ships, swords, etc -- all tools necessary to do their jobs. And that's basically what a computer is. In my experience, men that name their computers usually consider them to be female, and women that name their computers usually consider them to be male (though I have met a few exceptions to this). To me, names are always associated with a gender, so it's only natural that I consider my computers to have a gender as well.