my flat mates upped there systems to 24 and 32 and no major difference i have 8gb and never use it all unless i dedicate half to a virtual box os , when i built my 3rd desktop system i had a 250 gb ide system drive and 2x 160gb sata 150 drives in raid huge improvement, now a 128gig Samsung ssd on my c2d laptop boot in 20sec games blazing fast loading im now consider putting another in a optical drive caddy.