Poll: How much Ram do you consider ideal?

Right now I probably wouldn't build a system with less than 4GB, and certainly not less than 2GB.  Its fairly cheap and always better to have a little extra for those unexpected times.  I've maxed my laptop out at 2GB, but generally don't use over 500mb.  That changes when I fire up a development environment.  My mythtv box has 8GB in it.  I upgraded it from 2gig when it was first built and it made a huge difference in the time it took for videos to transcode.

We have an old family saying, "If a little will do a little good, then a lot will do a lot of good".  It holds true for RAM too.

i have 4 gb at the moment in my 64bit dual core system, my son has 2gb in his 32bit system, my two daughters have 1gb each & my eldest son has 1gb. All are running as smooth as necessary for what they do. My home server has 8gb which is necessary for the streaming video bit. My laptop has 1gb but never uses more than 600 odd mb.Now, going on my old p.c.'s, my p3 550mhz  has only 256mb  & runs Debian etch rather fast,much faster than my  laptop strangely enough.

Andy

My present mobo is maxed out at 2 gb, (single core, 64 bit) and it seems adequate, but I don't do much video stuff. At present that's the only reason I'd go higher, except for bdquick's reasoning. In the old days, our family saying, (contrary to B.G.'s comment) was "you can't have too much memory".

My present computer has 1 GB and it does most anything I could want of it. However since it is now approaching 4 years old I will probably build a replacement for it come Fall. I will go for at least 4 GB when I do if the prices are still reasonable.

As for Old Family sayings about memory mine was: "The first thing to go is something important but I can not recall what it was."

I have 3G so that each one of my 3 cores can have a gig when it wants.
Mine is a triple core 3G RAM & it's a year old. It just seems like one needs 1G  at least to do anything.
In my personal case definitely no less than 2G. Because the way things are going that'll be the new minimum.

8 gig here so cheap i couldn't resist

I have only 2 gigs in my xeon machine but I do have 4 gigs in my AMD X2 machine. The 2 gigs in the xeon seem sufficient for my needs and 4 gigs in the AMD seem a bit of a over kill but who knows I may need it at a later time...

I am using 6gb to take advantage of ddr3 on 64 bit both linux and microslop on seperate 1 tb sata hard drives.

I have 4 g on a quad core. Still have 2 more memory slots left Hmmm.. I hear there is a 32 g stick out there now I wonder...

I have 2GB but never get close to swapping. I actually tried the other day because I wanted to find out how small the image is to find out whether I could still hibernate with half the amount of swap.

With 4 vm machines(Various apps on them) running, an image open and a new image in gimp, file browser, web browser, torrent client, mail, compiz-fusion, a movie playing and a terminal I still couldn't get it to swap and struggled to get it to use 0.6GB

I've decided to wait till what ever program is leaking begins again and fills up swap, as in my experiment the cpu was at its limit(No real surprise)