It looks like I'm going to have to add memory to my nine-year-old Dell 4550 Windows XP desktop which I'm using here and which is my usual desktop machine at home. Right now it has 768 MB but watching Task Manager it seems lately that I need from 800 MB to 900 MB with the number of Chrome tabs I have open for Gmail, documents, etc. Amazon Cloud player is currently running. In spite of a growing RAM appetite, I haven't seen my old machine cross 1-GB yet (knock on wood).
It has a 256-MB DIMM and a 512-MB DIMM so I'll probably just replace the 256 with a 1-GB which seem to be available for $15 to <~ $20 or so. That will bring the total to 1.5 GB, over twice what I currently need.
I think Gmail and other Google apps are slowly using more and more memory. But maybe it's just Chrome.
It's worth noting that, even with 930 MB of memory usage (commit charge), which is what it is at this very moment as I type this, I don't really notice the paging or much slowness. Typing this entry is going fine and the Cloud Player music is playing nicely. However, I'd definitely notice it if switching to another tab that hadn't been used in a while or, worst of all, trying to fire up something else that's big like Acrobat Reader.
Hm, I don't think it was that long ago that I upped the RAM from 384 MB by replacing a 128-MB DIMM with the 512-MB. Memory usage seems to be accelerating.
In case anyone is curious, the only thing running down in my system tray is AVG and something from Nvidia for the video interface.