Before you jump ship entirely on HP, you may want to check around and see what others say about RAM and the particular model you're looking at getting - you may luck out. I know the RAM requirement is 100% true with their servers, but only 50% sure ab't their consumer-level products. I've seen three servers (all HP) where this is true: An older HP Netserver2 (where I first found out about it... the hard way), the DL-585 (my former employer had six of the critters - each w/ 4 opteron CPU's and 32GB of RAM per box), and the DL-380's. /P