New PC Advice - Not sure where to start.

[FR4NOx]

(2012-08-13 03:52)Zipppy Wrote:  Maybe 8 GB should be the lower-end of what you'd manage with, my brother has the same amount of memory on his MacBook, and he runs a VM with Windows 7 when he plays certain games (Borderlands being the most intensive), last time I checked. He doesn't have any issues as far as I've seen.

Yes, but Mac OS uses the hardware a little differently. If he give Windows 7 4Gb of RAM then he would still have plenty of RAM for Mac OS, and he probably wouldn't be leaving many programs open in Mac OS when he's using Windows 7 to play his games. I, however, prefer to leave Chrome with all of my many tabs and Paint.NET, and other programs open so they're all set up and ready to go when I need to use them, and I normally have unfinished work left open in PDN that I still need to complete, so I like to leave it open.
Right now I have Windows Explorer, Steam, Chrome with 1 window, 3 tabs, Windows Photo Viewer, iTunes, Task Manager, Skype and PDN open and I'm only using 2GB of ram because I was just playing GTA IV. I had to close most of my stuff just to run the game. When I'm in my groove I find that I use 3GB of RAM with Chrome alone, and I record with Debut a lot, too which takes up about 750MB of RAM. When I'm really working, boom I get a memory lockup at 5.8GB. That isn't even when I'm running Ylmf in VBox. I'll probably try 8GB for now and upgrade later on if I need to, since ram is so cheap nowadays.