Well, that's sort of true, and sort of not.
I've maxed out 8GB a few times so far even in relatively casual (though very 'power user') type of usage.
Running VMs is pretty handy, and it's no big deal for me to allocate 2-3GB to one and launch it while I've still got a load of my other applications active / open.
Doing processing that generates a lot of memory data then to be consumed by another process is another circumstance that has happened several times when transcoding video.
It's also handy for database and CAD type work I do.
I suppose it's like most PCs; they can sit mostly or totally idle for long periods of time, but when you do get around to using them and waiting for something to load / compute, they can seem awfully and annoyingly slow / limited at times.
Could I live with less? Sure. Do I want to? Not really, it saves me time with the better performance, and gives me opportunities to do useful tasks I couldn't otherwise easily do.
Just with 2 login sessions, about 70 windows of firefox open, 4-5 MS Office documents open, a few PDFs open, Visual Studio 2008 + its help system, a couple shell prompts, IE7, a file transfer utility, and a few miscellaneous other things loaded in Vista64 I was just at 3.7GB RAM
use. When I had the VM loaded that bumped it up to 6GB. I was on the verge of swapping doing a video encode, and I didn't even have the VM open then.
Now that is a lot of stuff going on, but that's just reflective of what seems efficient given the multi-tasking and research / development I do. Could I close a bunch of that stuff at any given moment and still have what I need accessible for the moment? Sure. But then I'd have to go sort through tons of bookmarks and re-open the browsers or documents I needed to refer to all the time. Web pages and MS office documents are pretty slow to locate / load, so it is a lot easier to just leave them open until I'm done with them.
With functional sleep / hibernate, there's even less incentive to close programs you know you're going to need again on a day to day basis because then you'd just have to wait for them to load and then try to find whatever files you had open again etc.
Granted a better session manager / bookmark manager for office documents, PDFs, browser pages, et. al would go a LONG way to making this all much more usable than the current mess where you can't even FIND the stuff you had open without a lot of slow navigation, file dialogs, et. al.
It probably saves me several minutes per hour of using the computer "casually" with these kinds of applications to not have to open/close things, and that's not a bad performance boost 365 days a year for $50 extra of memory.
Future-proofing? Sure you can't beat Moore's law, and I'll certainly eventually upgrade and this will all seem slow / limited. But there's a growing disparity between what's "good enough" computing power for most uses and what's needed for state of the art use. I'd say an 80386 CPU with 256MB RAM, 4GB HDD, with LINUX or Windows98 is more than enough for general web/internet, office application, email, et. al. uses. So as long as it gets 98% of my needs taken care of I won't need to replace this system for years to come.
In 2010 will some multimedia / game / technical 'killer application' emerge that might make me buy some 8-core Nehalem system with 10TB disc space and 64GB RAM? Oh, maybe/probably, but I'll probably still keep using the older system too at least until a single PC gets to be reliable enough that I won't want other PCs as backup devices / file servers, a "test" sandbox, or whatever.
Memory = storage? No, I realize they have distinct uses. But it takes about 7 hours to read all the data on a 1TB disc, longer than I want to wait for, say, a search result to tell me where the data file is that I'm looking for. So I better have enough memory to keep databases, search indices, caches, etc. as well as hold all my active programs / data because swapping or resorting to frequent HDD access is WAY WAY WAY too slow.
Originally posted by: Blain
You're missing the forest for the trees.
By the time you need 8GBs of memory, your DDR2 will be slow.
You're trying to pull off some kind of "future proofing" scheme. As a member here since 2005, you should no better than that by now.
Has the relative cheapness of DDR2 has blinded you? You seem to be equating "memory" with "storage"... It's not.