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Two 32-bit apps on a 64 bit operating system (and everyone is running a 64-bit OS now) can each use 4 GB of physical RAM. They're each in virtualized address s

Two 32-bit apps on a 64 bit operating system (and everyone is running a 64-bit OS now) can each use 4 GB of physical RAM. They're each in virtualized address spaces. A typical example of a workload that would use more RAM would be a bunch of big Excel documents open, a couple Chrome windows each with a bunch of tabs, Outlook and a chat app running in the background, and a profession-specific app like Visual Studio, Labview, Photoshop, Quickbooks, Solidworks, or whatever your specific job requires. Which represents just about every use case there is. This results in a consistent 70% usage on the 16 GB desktops across our office...and also about 90% usage on the older 8 GB machines. Like Parkinson's Law for computers, apps expand to use the computing power available to them. And if you want this machine to be usable 2-4 years down the road, you should desire the possibility of increasing to 32 GB.

cptskippy 9y ago
I think you're describing very atypical usage. Labview, Photoshop, and Solidworks are not typical applications, they're highly specialized and the only apps on your list that require 64 bit. I would expect anyone using them to have a high spec machine. Quickbooks and Visual Studio are 32 bit only apps and typically very memory efficient. I currently have Visual Studio open with a 17 project solution running the Interactive Debugger and it's only using 450 MBs. Office comes in a 64 bit flavor but Microsoft recommends you use the 32 bit version. They only recommend 64 Bit if you're using exceptionally large datasets or handling large image assets. Office Apps are very memory efficient and typically use less than 200 MBs each unless opening exceptionally large documents. The biggest memory hogs these days tend to be browsers and even then you have to open a lot of tabs. That being said, on Windows you need to look at Available Memory and not Free memory when calculating utilization, I believe it was Windows 8/2012 where they hid Free memory and only display Available Memory because Free Memory is a misleading metric. Windows will also always page certain things to disk even if you have plenty of Free/Available memory. Boosting Disk I/O and CPU speed is where a user will see the biggest benefits these days.

cptskippy 9y ago

I think you're describing very atypical usage. Labview, Photoshop, and Solidworks are not typical applications, they're highly specialized and the only apps on your list that require 64 bit. I would expect anyone using them to have a high spec machine. Quickbooks and Visual Studio are 32 bit only apps and typically very memory efficient. I currently have Visual Studio open with a 17 project solution running the Interactive Debugger and it's only using 450 MBs. Office comes in a 64 bit flavor but Microsoft recommends you use the 32 bit version. They only recommend 64 Bit if you're using exceptionally large datasets or handling large image assets. Office Apps are very memory efficient and typically use less than 200 MBs each unless opening exceptionally large documents. The biggest memory hogs these days tend to be browsers and even then you have to open a lot of tabs. That being said, on Windows you need to look at Available Memory and not Free memory when calculating utilization, I believe it was Windows 8/2012 where they hid Free memory and only display Available Memory because Free Memory is a misleading metric. Windows will also always page certain things to disk even if you have plenty of Free/Available memory. Boosting Disk I/O and CPU speed is where a user will see the biggest benefits these days.