[Blarg]

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A gig of RAM is just nice to have. As other posters have said, 512MB is more than enough. But more importantly, I don't understand why you believe that using all of your RAM is critical. I have 1GB of RAM in my box and barely ever use it all (except for playing something system intensive like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3).

Don't worry about it, and be happy your box isn't swapping like the dickens. If you really feel that strongly about it, drop it down to 512MB and send me the gig you have left over [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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My guess is that he's hearing his hard drive grinding all the time and wants to hear less of that, so he's wondering if some of the constant write to disk could be cut back.

I've noticed that my computer can seem to grind its HD like crazy too when I'm playing 8 tables and importing from them on Pokertracker.

I've solved this problem in a few small steps.

First, I put pokertracker on a separate disk, so I can do disk intensive things without writing on the same disk so often, and often getting laggy results because of it.

Second, I time my pokertracker imports. I will generally have imports at around 15 minutes per site, and if the imports are timed close together, it can sound like constant disk grinding and lead to big slowdowns and even delays and disconnects from the tables. Making one site auto-import at minute 7 and one at minute 15 takes care of that.

Add ons can slow things down, too. Gametime was getting a little notoriety when it first came out because of that problem. Now I restart gametime after a few hours.

Finally, the Party skins put hand histories on your hard disk, and the more hand histories and tables there are, the more imports and database collating can slow down as pokertracker churns through more and more data. Deleting or moving handhistories from tables you have left or from previous periods of time can help keep imports quicker and result in much less HD grinding.

A little note on games, just from my personal experience -- I used to be a big time RTS game and MMORPG game player, and found that 512 seemed to be a minimum for good gameplay in varied situations -- both these types of games are constantly reading and writing to disks as many factors in their game "worlds" are constantly changing and being recorded, and memory is very quickly filled. It's often not enough, and I've noticed in multiple games a significant benefit to going up to at least 768 of RAM, and often but not always a notable difference between 768 RAM and a full gig of RAM. Depending on the games you play, your mileage my vary.

For multi-taskers like me, there are often web pages and other things up no matter what you're doing, so I'd strongly recommend a gig of RAM to almost anyone at this point.