[darklajid]

I don't understand what surprises you. The memory load depends in large parts on the work requirements, I'd guess.

2 weeks ago I went from 4 GB to 8 GB (still would love to have more) here at work, because 4 didn't cut it and lead to lots of paging.

  Visual Studio (often 2 or 3 instances, grabbing around 300-500 each)
  MS SQL Server
  IIS
  OCR Engines (depending on load)

With Windows 7 as host (already not a slim OS) this killed my productivity with 4 GB, especially if (to get back on topic) I opened my beloved Firefox...

[justincormack]

Same here but from 8 to 16 on both my desktops. Huge improvement under Windows, less under Linux with SSD. Working habits vary, but I multitask a lot.