I know memory is fairly inexpensive these days, but I think 4GiB of RAM is excessive. I did have a 2x1 dual channel kit in my laptop until one of the sticks went bad about a year ago. I never bothered to replace it, and I haven't suffered either. Right now I'm running a browser with several tabs open, a few shells in one terminal emulator, a couple of file manager windows, a PDF viewer, and an editor with a few tabs open (this is about all I typically use when programming), and I'm using around 615MiB-- a little over half-- of my mem and 0MiB of swap. I wouldn't have much to gain from another 3GiB of memory even if it is only a few dollars more.
I almost never have "several" tabs open. It's usually ~15 tabs on my main browser (Chrome), and often more than 30. And also an additional 5 tabs in Firefox, Safari, and several versions of IE.
Right now, web browsers are using over 2GB of memory. This is fairly typical from the web developers that I work with. So perhaps it depends on what your software targets. But I would argue if you're building web apps, then 4GB RAM is by no means excessive.
At my previous job (working on e-commerce sites built on IBM Websphere Commerce) the server setup was so heavy and complicated and client-specific that we did everything in VMs that were passed around on external hard drives. If I was working on one client and needed to look up something for another, I regularly came close to maxing out my full 8 gig of RAM.
That might be true, but I don't develop web apps so I can't argue and I'll respect your opinion. Consequently, I don't understand why posting a relevant, evidential opinion is grounds for negative karma. I'm not complaining-- I genuinely don't get it. I thought that was for violating the guidelines (I concede that if anything this comment is the one the should be treated as such for that reason).
