What's a "normal" amount of RAM to have on a laptop?

Today? I'd never go below 8 gigs

I have 4 GB.

My current chrome sessions already uses 4G.

For windows. If you are running linux than less is sufficient.

I have 6 GB. I rarely have problems with too much memory usage.

If you take a look at really cheap laptops (like the HP 355), they already come with 8G and plus.

In the <$400 category.

I have about 0.6 GB of RAM free right now.

Well, only you know what you really need.

Generally free RAM is wasted RAM. But i try to keep a 1G headroom on windows machines.

Well, I have 0.8 free with just this chrome tab and task manager open.

Then you might want to throw in some more.

I notice a problem when I have my music composition software (Finale) running

?

What's the problem?

Then you definitely need more.

I reloads its sound banks every time I switch pieces of music.

As in... it probably has a problem keeping all of it in RAM

I guess I'll figure out how to add more RAM sometime.

8 gigs here. I'd say about 6 is sufficient for a laptop.

afaik Finale proxies to RAM from time to time.

Chrome is quite a RAM hog since each website is a separate process.

Unfortunately this website doesn't seem to work for me: downloadmoreram.com

Bummer. That's what I would have recommended.

@quartata Multiprocessing does not correlate to RAM usage.

But with Firefox, once it takes RAM it never gives it back

If I run it for a week or two, then close all but a handful of tabs, it still uses 3 GB.

@minxomat Yes, not necessarily. However in the case of Chrome I think it has some really fancy rendering engine that (on Linux at least) when running in each individual process seems to take a lot of memory.

I have chrome, a terminal, libreoffice and thunderbird open and that's 4 gigs in total.

And closing thunderbird and libreoffice keeps it still at about 4 gigs so.

I frequently use VMWare to virtualize OSX on my windows laptop. So it needs at least 16G of RAM. My linux netbook (runs arch linux) has 512M of RAM and runs chromium with multiple tabs just fine :D

Huh.

Yeah. It just works. If I need more tabs I switch to netsurf.

Guess it's just my DE.

I'll bet Chrome adjusts its memory usage periodically or continually.

Probably

Why are people upvoting my Foo Hello World palindrome

It wasn't even hard.

They should be upvoting the TI BASIC answer or something.

It's well known that upvotes are proportional to the inverse square of effort.

Hmm.

U=1/w^2. I see

Well to tell you the truth I did put some effort into it.

That's why you didn't get infinite votes.

I just feel bad that I'm getting reputation from this while the guy who posted the question has lost all his reputation from downvotes.

@feersum Next time I'll use HPQ+

Then I will get infinite upvotes.

I mean, it's not a lot of reputation (I've never posted any answers that have gotten more than 3 upvotes) but I mean still.

You can't post an answer using 0 effort at T > 0.

There's always a little needed to click, press key, copy paste etc.

Then I'll get someone to do it for me.

I won't even use effort speaking. I'll just point at the challenge.

Watch the upvotes roll in.

If someone else works on the answer you have to include that in the effort measurement.

Hmph.

I suppose writing a program to solve easy challenges would be effort too.

I mean the effort involved in copypasta is so small it's basically 0.

I don't see why HPQ+ wouldn't get me at least a lot of upvotes.

It would of course. Just not infinite.

Tricky, tricky.

It's just like how you can't really have absolute zero, or a pure crystal.

You can't have zero effort.

Just reading the challenge is effort

And if you try to use telepathy to get the challenge, that's effort too.

Just breathing while you think about looking for a new challenge is effort.

So does this formula apply to chat stars as well?

.

Let's see.

Wait wait let's experiment.

Boom. Let's see if the stars roll in.

Come on come on.

Not sure if that will work. If you observe the stars too hard, it tends to change their state.

(oops.)

OK let's just be quiet then...

@PhiNotPi No surprises there. I chose 4GB and got 4097kb. What am I going to do with 0.5001 MiB of RAM?

It's not working. What did I do wrong?

I'd say this was about w = O(.25n) effort.

Stars don't follow an inverse square law, if that's what you're thinking.

Der

They don't? Hmm

That's kinda sad.

What law do they follow?

One statistic they do exhibit is that the more times the same message has been posted in chat, the more likely an instance of that message is to get starred.

Ooh ooh! I got it!

ಠ_ಠ

(PERFECT)

I had to star that. It really IS the perfect choice. :P

(It's working!)