How much memory is "enough"? I've got 4 GB (imagine telling someone 5 years ago you had 4 Gigabytes of memory!) in my machine right now and I'm really wishing I had more. Enough so that I've got (4) 2GB memory sticks in my shopping cart at NewEgg. I'd get 16 GB, but it's just too expensive right now. It would seem like 4 GB would be enough, but when I upgraded my machine a while back to Vista (64-bit) I took a VMWare snapshot of my XP machine before the upgrade. I'm still using that machine since I've got a few apps. that need to run and I haven't really wanted to spend the money upgrade to the new versions. I like to allocate approx. 1.5 GB of memory to that machine. I also maintain a VMWare image of Visual Studio that gets 2 GB of memory. Between the both of them I can't really run them at the same time with any reasonable performance.

How much memory do most developers now run? I'm guessing 2 GB is now "entry level". I can use up 1 GB of memory just with Visual Studio. If I don't close FireFox down regularly it'll keep taking up memory (I've seen it as high as 300-400 MB of memory). Outlook grabs around 130 MB. Add a few other apps. to that and suddenly that doesn't leave much room for the OS.

8 GB should give me a bit of breathing room, at least for a bit. How many years until I'm saying something like, "I've got 4 TB of memory and it's not quite enough..."