Quote:
Originally Posted by arjaybe
Understood. I have 4GB and never touch swap. I rarely see my RAM usage over 1GB, and then it's usually because I have Virtualbox running. Like you, I believe in having lots of freeboard, but I don't think Gregg is going to swamp 4GB even with "light" video editing. If it really is cheap and easily available and easily installed and so on, going for 8GB is fine. If it's the least bit of hassle though, I say forget it.
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My previous desktop was a dual core 32 bit machine built from components.
In that system, 4GB was the max the system could hold, and the max the installed OSes (WinXP and Ubuntu) could use
because it was 32 bit.
Windows could only see/use 3.2GB of it for technical reasons. I found a freeware ramdisk driver that could use the extra ram Windows could,'t access, and had a 768MB ramdrive seen as Z: that I used for things like Firefox profile and cache. Sped things up a treat. Linux didn't have that limit and saw all 4GB. I saw little or no swap use in either OS.
But one factor is usage pattern. I tend to do one thing at a time. My primary application is Firefox, and it's usually the active major app in either OS. If I was running several major apps and switching between them, that would change RAM requirements. Linux wants to keep everything in RAM, and I could easily exhaust physical RAM and wind up hitting swap in short order. It's why I maxxed the RAM in the current 64bit machine. What I do now could likely have been accommodated by the 4GB the box came with, but what I might do in the future would be another matter.
How much hassle adding RAM is depends on the user. I know folks who would be lost at sea and ask me to do it for them, but Greg seems like he could handle it.
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Dennis