Everyone knows that PCs sold today have more RAM than they did in the olden days.  The question is, why?  Applications grow hungrier and RAM prices keep falling, of course, but operating system bloat is the biggest reason.  A review of systems that PC World Test Centrehas evaluated since 1999 reveals that the average RAM provision has grown from 96MB to about 2GB, spiking whenever Microsoft releases a new version of Windows.  For example, when Windows XP machines started appearing, system RAM increased, on average, from about 128MB to more than 256MB.  When Windows Vista started shipping, our test PC’s RAM jumped from slightly more than 1GB to about 2GB.  Windows’ minimum system requirements ballooned from 16MB to 1GB over the same period.  So when you are ready to upgrade your PC and your OS, you can assume that you’ll need substantially more RAM.

written by Alan Stafford of PC World Magazine