Compatibility of old(ish) Software with Windows 7

[Robert Lauriston]

I typically have 10-15 applications running and if I come close to
using 4GB it's a sign that one of my apps (usually Firefox) has a
memory leak. As I noted earlier, I ran 64-bit Windows at work for a
year and a half and performance was indistinguishable from my 32-bit
system at home, and at work I preferred the 32-bit version of
Photoshop since the 64-bit version took so long to load.

If people experience performance bottlenecks on a PC with 4GB of RAM
and 32-bit Windows when not performing resource-intensive tasks such
as editing video, it's due to unnecessary bloatware, cycle-hogging
utilities such as Bitdefender, software with memory leaks, or malware.

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 5:56 AM, Harding, Dan <dharding at illinois.edu> wrote:
> "I think buying more than 4GB of RAM would be a waste of money for most tech writers."
>
> I disagree 100%. It's not just the specific application(s) you run, but also how you work, that determines how much RAM is useful.
>
> If you only ever run a single word-processing application, then yes, more would be a waste. However, if you are a rampant multitasker, as I am, where you have a desktop pub application, word processing, Excel, a half dozen browser windows, etc., running simultaneously, system RAM is essential for responsiveness and to avoid virtual memory swapping.