main rig has 1gb ram on xp. the most i ever use is about 70%. occasionally if I'm encoding video or recording and editing sound i may run out. but to solve that i bought a cheap but fast (surprisingly fast for its price) 80gb SATA hdd and use that for the page file. i know its not as fast as real ram but the computer hardly ever has to use it. and i get an extra 78gb of storage space!

for those of you who know about my ghetto rig (link if you don't), I've since added some more ram to bring it to 196mb. before it would idle at about 20mb of ram free, but now i have a little more breathing space. it can play unreal tournament without running out of ram now! woot!

as for my brothers computer with 256mb of generic DDR, you sort of have to plan your day around the computer; it takes half an hour to get going. once its going though it can cope fine with the basics, until my brother wants to play a networked deathmatch on unreal tournament against me (i always win). then things get a bit slow.... he usually blames it on me for not bothering to buy any more ram for that computer when it was mine. in fact i did buy more ram for it, its just that i sold it just before giving the computer to him... hehehe...