(This came up in another thread and I thought it might be of general interest.)
With XP you can easily monitor how much physical memory you're actually using. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and select the "Performance" tab. My experience is that if you simply start up XP with a few tasks, such as Norton AntiVirus installed, and Outlook Express running, you're using about 256MB if you have that much available. If you don't have that much available things will be page-swapped from disk to memory as needed. I think the guys are right that say 256MB is the real minimum requirement, and even then there's going to be lots of swapping.
I ordered this new box with 512MB and then added the 256MB board out of my old one just for good measure.
You can select the "Processes" to see what's running and taking up that memory. The "Applications" tab will show just the user programs you are running.
[This message was edited by Ron Page on 12 January 2005 at 04:54 PM.]
