I Just Tripled my Desktop Memory to 6GB

Nah. 6 gigs not, but 1 gig is common for it both on my notebook and the PC.

What Ram is it? $24 seems so cheap for 4 gigs, wish i could get a deal like that.

Virtual allocation or resident memory consumption? How much of it is shared? It's not unusual for modern applications to ask for a large section of available address space, but only use a small part of it.

Shared memory in this case is physical memory claimed by a process that doesn't (solely) use it, and that the OS ‘borrows’ for other processes. It could include dynamic libraries, for example.

Virtual memory that swaps out to disk blurs the lines too, since a process could, for instance, use low resident space, high swap space, allocating a large chunk of virtual address space – does that count as space-efficient?

Figuring out just how much memory a process is using is tricky for these reasons. It's probably not a reliable yardstick of ‘performance’ on its own.

That's somewhat true, as I understand it. Integers might still be 32-bit wide, where longs are 64-bit wide. (Or, indeed, integers could be 64-bit wide, depending on the platform.) Other units get bigger too, such as pointers. Applications can double in size, but it could be less, depending on code and platform.

That's very interesting, sounds like a complicated process.

I only judge the performance in the sense that I don't want my swap being used at all. I still have IDE hard drives, and my system grinds to a halt when it starts to swap out memory. SATA drives are the next planned upgrade.

Actually, it's a HP Pavilion dv9417cl

The specs say:

Memory 2048 MB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)
Memory Max Max supported 2048 MB

So if I have 2GB, I am at the max, right?

It's mostly ok, I always have many windows open, I have FileANT which says I am at 69% Memory usage right now, about average...

Yup, sounds like you're maxed out. 2GB should be plenty for a laptop anyway, unless you have several virtual workspaces or do video editing or something.

Thanks for the input, which confirms my own observations

My laptop has Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu - dual boot.

I have used Macs from time to time (in the mid 90s I supervised the computer room at Kinkos with several Macs on the network - they were setting up some kind of printserver on and off the network, and the Macs kept getting false aliases to printers on the network on their desktops - the PCs just followed where the network took them)

My mom has a Powerbook laptop, and I have done some work on it troubleshooting her AirPort wifi (I had to enable a setting just for my PC - or any other computer - to see the network. I suppose you could argue that is more secure - or annoying). That was in her summer house, actually now she has it configured as an unsecured network - so much for Mac security.

Despite what Mac afficionados say, I find the interface and admin to be really counter-intuitive, maybe just because I am used to PC.

I read about apps on PCWorld to add Mac features like a "ribbon" dock to PC - and I think "Why?" (I guess to make Mac users feel more comfortable).

One thing, a Mac boots a LOT faster than a PC with Vista (yes, I have trimmed all my startup programs and disabled lots of Windows apps I don't use). One thing I discovered, the "snipping tool" shich I use all the time for quickie screen caps is part of the Tablet PC app, which I do not otherwise use.

Mostly, I want a Mac for compatibility testing web sites, I don't like relying on browsershots. I remember a few years back that Macs render forms quite differently. Now that they released Safari for Windows (with the same rendering peculiarities) there is a bit less incentive.

I guess when I get closer, I will open a thread for this (should be fun) I know I have wandered somewhat off topic > off topic