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I am probably going to migrate my work laptop (WinXP, ThinkPad T61) to Windows7 soon, and want to take the opportunity to upgrade to a 64bit OS and use the infinite amounts of RAM this will allow :)

Given that laptop RAM not free, how much RAM would actually make a difference to my normal dev environment - VisualStudio running in a couple of instances, Firefox with umpty tabs open, perhaps one or two other apps running as well? Will I see much difference in upgrading from 32bit XP and 2GB RAM, and if so where is the cut off point? Is 4GB enough, or will I see a noticeable improvement with 6 or 8 or whatever... Thanks!

Joel in Gö
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Visual Studio is only 32-bit. So anything above 3GB wont help a single instance. Running more instances should behave better (if memory usage is high per instance).

leppie
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    Memory is used for more than addressable memory space. A 32 bit program may well roam around a set of files the total size of which can be way, way greater than 4GB. The more memory a system has installed the greater the chance the required pages from those files are still in memory. These pages can be dynamically swapped in and out of a 32bit application's Virtual Memory space without the need to re-read them from disk. Hence whilst it is true the VS specifically is unlikely to benefit from more than 3GB memory its not true that that is direct a result of its being a 32 bit app. – AnthonyWJones Jul 28 '09 at 13:53
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I've used two machines, on with 4GB and one with 8GB - Couldn't tell the difference between them and I was doing things pretty similar to you. If 8GB is not that much more - it could be worth investing now otherwise 4GB should be plenty.

TWith2Sugars
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More then 4GB only makes sense if you are planning to run 2 or more Virtual Machines and Visual Studio at the same time.

Colin
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You won't see much improvement much past 3GB for what you are doing so 4GB sounds fine.

AnthonyWJones
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In the year 2018, Visual Studio is still running in a 32bit process.

This means that it can use roughly 4 GB of RAM memory, maybe a little less.

Yes, a 32-bit architecture is limited to addressing a maximum of 4 gigabytes of memory. Depending on the operating system, this number can be cut down even further due to reserved address space. https://stackoverflow.com/a/8869596/2874896

Just for reference, as you can see in the picture below, Visual Studio is buzzying around 3,5 GB RAM (I just rebuilt this solution to eat more memory for the picture. Medium sized project). The other Visual Studio instance is lying around at only 176,8 MB of RAM (idling, but a very very large solution). So as a bonus it seems that Visual Studio is good at idling at least ;).

enter image description here

I'm running Windows 10 64bit on a Macbook Pro with 32 GB of ram. But as you can see - a single instance of Visual Studio won't really eat more memory.

Jim Aho
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    In recent versions Visual Studio is running multiple processes, for instance designers and Roslyn code analysis is out-of-process. That means the pressure to switch to 64-bit was somewhat alleviated. – Tomas Karban Sep 04 '18 at 11:53
  • However, in my experience with VS2015 with Resharper, WinForms and WPF designers -- working set gets over 2 GB, then GC is eating your CPU, VS becomes sluggish and eventually freezes. That leads to restarting or killing VS at least twice each working day. My machine has 20+ GB of available memory that is not used, which is sad. – Tomas Karban Sep 04 '18 at 12:00