RBnDFW wrote:
Steve B wrote:
... Bumped up RAM to 2 GB, and hooey, what a difference. ...

Yessir, RAM is like some other things, you just can't have too much.

I consider 2 GB a minimum now, Win XP and above.

Thanks for the tip. I had 1/2G, added another 1G ($55, Amazon). My
wife's PC, too. From 256MB (!) to 1G.

She noticed a BIG difference, but I didn't. So I went poking around the
'net & found this free MS utility ("Process Explorer") that monitors
memory usage:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

To my surprise, I have not seen any memory use above 600MB. I've opened
a number of app's simultaneously, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and
MS Excel, which I had thought were real memory pigs. They added very
little to the usage.

So I'm wondering what uses a lot of memory. Maybe data, like pix &
music. But if MP3 is, say, 2MB/minute, I'd have to have hours of music
IN MEMORY, to get up to a total of 1G. Raw music takes more, but still
.... Likewise pix - I'd have to be working on hundreds of them
simultaneously.

Well, then, video. The little video I have is low res (640 x 480) AVI.
It ranges from .1M to 1.1M per second. So if I were editing a 10
minute clip, it would need 60 - 660MB to keep it in memory. So, I tried
it on a 100MB clip - it didn't keep it memory (usage only went up about
30MB).

So, I dunno. Anybody know why a lot of memory might be needed?

Thanks,
Bob