[Joshuashawharvey]

When you are given minimum and recommended system requirements for your applications or games, they can be misleading. For example if an application needs 256MB RAM, that means the system needs 256MB RAM available, not that the system should have that, in fact your system should have much more, as it needs 256MB for the game/app to function correctly, then the rest to operate windows and any other background applications. Minimum system requirements means that the game/app should be ran in all lowest possible graphics setting for games, and the most basic graphical settings for your apps in order to function correctly. Recommended system requirements refer to running the game/app in medium graphical settings, NOT high, for high you will need above the recommended system requirements.

[Studio 2]

Exactly right.

It all depends on what you have running at any given time. For example, lot's of new games say something like '1Gb Ram, Pentium 4 2.2GHz CPU' etc, but this is merely a guide. It's not always better to have more RAM, as some people think it is, but trim your system's running processes down. I've seen PCs with over 50 processes running, and I've showed that trimming it down to about 20 greatly increases the resources. A must if you want to play games at top quality.