RAM Monsters
Whenever people ask me about buying new PC’s these days, I always recommend they get at least 512MB RAM to be able to run things properly.
Last night, on my PC which currently has 1GB RAM, I noticed, that while not doing anything terribly strenuos, it was using something like 800MB, according to take manager.
So I started looking at the long list of processes running and just thinking, most of those are things I actually use, though maybe not all the time. I thought maybe something funny was going on, but no, no spyware or anything odd running, just a load of applications I have on my machine.
Windows XP can be enough of a memory hog itself. Then there’s AntiVirus, Firewall, Spyware and Spam filter applications.
There’s MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger that were running, with a couple of addons, ATI Contorl Panel and something else related to that. Software for various parts of the TV card, like the remote control and the SQL DB it tries using.
Then you’ve got Opera, with all my email. At times Firefox and IE when doing other stuff. Winamp for some music. Boinc running SETI and another distributed computing analyser thing. A registry cleaner I’d just been recommended was sending MS AntiSpyware nuts as it kept trying to add itself to the startup folder in the registry itself (so much for cleaning it, it was instead filling it up).
This is without even running Dreamweaver or Fireworks, which are both memory hogs, and DW can be a right pain in the arse at times (though I’d have to say, not so bad since I had a gig of ram, rather than 512mb). I’m not running Bloglines notifier on my home machine like I do at work either.
All in all, there’s a shed load of stuff about thats using up RAM. Most of those apps above are probably using 3 or 4MB+ each. Browsers can quite easily start suing 30-50MB. It’s nice to have some of this stuff loaded on bootup, but it just means that your ALWAYS running with loads of RAM being used up by apps you may not be using. And some apps are only there for protection, and using up as much memory as some of the things they are blocking.
Considering everyone should be running AntiVirus and Firewall(more important on Broadband anyway), and are then going to have browsers and email clients at the very least, I wonder how people survive with the many machines with 256MB or less on them, the whole bottom half of the new market is made up by machines with 256MB RAM as well. XP is meant to run on 128MB RAM, and some people do, though I don’t know how.