On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:33:39 -0500, the infamous Bob Engelhardt
scrawled the following:

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?

Graphics files, animations, movie streaming/cache, database cache,
etc. Browsers now grab 100MB just to start up.

--
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to
make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done,
whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be
learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably
the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
-- Thomas H. Huxley