by 
Anonymous
ANSWERS: 3
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Typically the way you do this is to check out the minimum systems requirements. On all store bought software, this is printed on the side of the box, and for most downloaded programs, you can find it published on the website. If it is a program that maybe a friend wrote or something like that, I would say just give it the "ole college try" and see what happens
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Personally, I run the thing, open up the Task Manager to see how much space it's taking up, then double that. Of course, I have a desktop with 2GB RAM so there is very little that I can't open due to a lack of memory. I rarely trust the official requirements as they are often written by a moron. For instance, WinXP *can* run in only 128MB RAM, the official minimum, but checking it out my way reveals that WinXP takes up over 400MB of RAM. Many have claimed that WinXP bogs harshly on any system with less than 512MB, and now you know why; on any system with less than 512MB, you are flogging nine flavors of dog-piss out of the swap file. Don't trust the box unless you are the type of guy who would buy ocean-front property in Utah.
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Thats pretty tricky, you see most major programs on Linux use shared libraries to facilitate certain functionality. Take for example a KDE text editing program. As an example it would use things like: * Various KDE shared libraries to allow for interaction with other KDE components, etc. * X libraries to allow its visuals * Various general system libraries to allow it to perform basic operations, such as IO. Many of these shared libraries, especially commonly used ones (like libc), are used by many of the programs running on a Linux system. Due to this sharing, Linux is able to use a great trick: it will load a single copy of the shared libraries into memory and use that one copy for every program that references it. I'm not sure about other operating systems, but I have a feeling they'd do something similar. I guess it also depends on exactly why you've asked the question, but I like to be safe rather than sorry and stick shed-loads of RAM in my machines :)
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