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

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.