it's not that bad, honestly, i had my whole 4gb ram occupied once ... and each program was less than 100mb ram ... It was like: 2 games open (!@#$%^&* ppl interrupting me all the time), office (for my reports and all), jbuilder (for java programming needed for my project), vb6 (the occasional programming bit when i was distracted and thought of something to change in 1 of my 140 different projects, such as xdcc download manager annoying me again ^^), paint shop pro (taking screenshots to add to my report), 2-3 msn windows (ppl bugging me for once, that's a lot for me, usually noone starts a conversation with me .. wonder why ), yahoo messenger (to use voice conference with my friends (just the 2), few notepads (usually for viewing source code of webpages or todo list or something), percobol (had to make cobol stuff for projects), 2-3 internet explorers (yay for tabs, else there would be 10+, had to look up stuff, randomly view favs, etc), thunderbird (check my inbox for sporadically rare emails), azureus & xdcc download manager (for episodes downloading) .. and that's about it