We live in time when one may compare price of one RAM chip to price of beers drinked in one night ;))) . I remember many many times more expensive ones.
Indeed, buying RAM definitely is the way to improve computing performance and the time saved is well worth the money - but as Wookey says, buying RAM sometimes just isn't possible - if it's not your machine for example or is an older / laptop motherboard. I played with Therion a year or so back and like the idea, more or less drew a map before giving up and doing it by hand and tracing that in Photoshop. I've not used it since then (no time and no caves to draw!) although I've lurked here watching new developments. I've got a list of other things to do as long as my arm, but I would be prepared to spend a little bit of time helping to port XTherion to C++ (wxWindows?). It's certainly a very worthwhile project. Don't expect anything from me anytime soon though... -Matt