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I can understand not wanting to throw good money after bad.
One of my brothers was looking into another round of upgrades for his 2.4 GHz P4 laptop (2 GB 400 MHz RAM and a 128 MB IDE interface SSD for about $400). I think I convinced him that for what he does, he would be better off selling his current laptop for $100 and spending the $400 that would have gone to upgrades, and getting a 2.2 GHz Core 2 with 4 GB of RAM and a 300 GB hard drive on sale.
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I wouldn't be in a hurry to blame the IT guy for waste.
It's possible that there are two different requisition methods and budgets at play so that the RAM comes out of a limited IT operating budget while the PC comes from your departments annual budget.
If he hits the IT budget for a stick of RAM for your department, his boss might get pissed that he's blowing resources better devoted to infrastructure and that outsourced wiring guy who braids the cables in the machine rooms so nicely.
Also, there might be a different approval process for the memory where the request has to go through a tight-fisted jerk.
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last fall I asked a different IT guy if he had a 256 or 512 stick of common, but ancient PC133 memory, and in a day, a new, still sealed 512 was lying on my desk.
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Where I once worked, they obviously had a "deal" with some higher-ups brother-in-law so a stick of RAM that was $30 from OWC or even Best Buy cost the company $100 because they "had" to buy it from the "preferred" supplier. I got turned down a lot when I requested RAM and upgrades for the couple hundred PCs I looked after. Imagine, running XP with 256 MB of RAM, because there wasn't money in the budget to upgrade. After a while I just shook my head at the foolishness and let things be.
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Realize that most corporate buyers do have contracts with suppliers such that the deal-oriented hardware purchases the likes of us here frequently make are just not available to them. The result is unreasonably high-priced when you're used to seeing 2GB RAM for ~$20-30 but your company can't pick it up for less than $50.
g=
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Those sorts of "arrangements" in other walks of life are generally called "kickbacks", and are illegal...
But oddly enough, when it comes to IT contracts, they seem to be widely accepted.
The County Office Of Edu. tried to get us to "subscribe" to their "preferred vendor" for technology...
I picked 6-7 items from their online catalog, and showed the boss MY usual vendor(s) for those items... All of the items were at LEAST 50% higher in cost through the "preferred vendor".
Fortunately, we declined the "partnership arrangement".
