I wouldn't worry about it much until you get your Real system up and running.....

Patric: Is that an old system? it's unusual to max out at 128Mb. Even my old system could handle 320Mb of Ram. Is their a setting in the bios that needs changing or something? I know that you are experienced with computers, but that sounds a little odd.

Bryan...some boards have limits on max ram per bank and even what variations of ram will or won't work.
Eg, an old board of mine has 4 slots but will only accept 8 meg in two, even though I have 4 identical 8 meg sticks [edo].
Sometimes the same ram size/config, but different manufacturer can be enough to make it fail...

Same here. My laptop surprised me with how quickly it will do renderings and the like. It's nothing compared to Peff's though; Toshiba Satellite 1415 - 1.8Ghz Celeron, 256MB, 30MB HD, 16 MB GeForce 4, DVD/CDRW.

But mine only cost about 1/3rd of what Peff paid for his. ^_~

It's still nothing compared to my desktop though (which is 'only' an Athlon XP 1700+)

bit late, but, as much ram as you can stuff into it is great, but, you do need to optimize it no matter what when running graphics apps.

Programs, bleed in memory, taking little chunks ( allocating small areas ) that they do not always release. DLL's will TSR ( Terminate and Stay Resident) on you for a couple of different reasones. One being faster loading of the application the next time around, which, is somethin gyou have to off set against usable memory loss for other applications and rendering. One of the other reasons is that some programs just don't care, sloppy code, or something is hooked that doesn't release a certain register in memory so a small part sticks. As with hard drive allocation units, there is a set size and even a small amount of data that does not fill that unit, will in fact make the rest of it look used and for it to be passed over when something is looking for a slot to load code into....

Memory optimization, releaseing memory is a good thing, Unloading DLL's of closed programs can be tricky, but it is also another good thing once you know which ones you can unload and which you have to leave...

anyway... the above is personal opinion which is mine and mine alone as far as known to me, no small animals were used in testing and Dolphin safe nets are always used...

take it for what you wil, something's to consider.

I have found that using RAM optimizers causes my hard drive to chatter like an angry squirrel....
Just my opinion and no squirrels were harmed in anyway (well not more than a few anyhow).

Ram Optimizers should have a setting to minimize to the system tray, and then you can recover with a click... I dunno, it's a personal choice, but with heavy editing of graphics it can make a huge difference in speed of refreshing the work and also rendering if you clear and recover memory before hand...

I find that a good and safe PC Cleaner works wonders; it's amazing the amount of junk that one collects be it internet or otherwise. Regular cleanups are vital. This also applies to the registry. I use jv16 power tools -especially for registry cleanup- and it does make a difference. This software has the facility of back-ups (freeware).

Also the amount of services that you have running in windows background by default slows down any PC quite a bit. Many of these services can run manually or be disabled altogether. Of course, these depend on your needs!

Other optimization software like: Norton System Tools, System Mechanic or Ontrack Repair-it software do make sure that your PC is running at a safe pace.

Installing heavy-consuming software or images at the root of your hard disk does also help.