Good to hear you're sorted, Brian.
The whole trouble is that computing, as an 'industry', is moving at light-speed compared to almost any other market sector. Most things, at 6-7 years old, have a ton of life still left in them, and are considered to be just getting 'run-in'. Anything tech-related, at that age it's beyond old. It's ancient. It's 'dinosaur-era'. It's not only got one foot in the grave, it's near as dammit got all the nails bar the last couple already hammered down in the lid.
Uber-geeks, and the tech blog journos don't help matters by insisting everyone MUST run the very newest of everything ALL THE TIME (and throw the 'safety/security' angle in, just to give you additional incentive to upgrade, like...) You're given the impression that if you don't 'keep up with the Joneses' then everyone will look down their noses at you and your life will come screeching immediately to an expensive & ignominious end. Uber-geeks, in particular, love spending all their time bragging about all the top-end, super hyper deluxe incredibly expensive gear they run, casually dropping a grand here, two grand there as though it were NOTHING.
KGIII has the right of it. Most devs these days run fully-loaded systems, with massive amounts of RAM/huge amounts of storage/ridiculously powerful CPUs, and take for granted that everyone is in the same place as them. As I've said before - somewhere! - your RAM is their playground. Nobody makes the slightest attempt to keep code 'tight & tidy' any longer; the advent of some of these modern programming languages positively encourages 'lazy' coding....
(Bear in mind that 16-32 GB RAM is now considered to be a necessity these days for a responsive system, irrespective of OS. They're seriously talking about PCs probably coming with 64-128 GB RAM as standard in the next 3-4 years....OOTB.)
And the one indispensable part of any system, the browser, has itself had to evolve to defend against all the on-line crap it gets bombarded with......resulting in multi-process monsters that have become RAM-guzzlers, due to every tab running in a separate 'sandbox' as it tries to keep your system/personal data safe.
Apparently, they have the
cheek to call this 'progress'.....!!!!!
Mike.