They are two separate issues altogether.

1. Use your PC as you would normally. Open the regular programs as much as you would normally do, including games. Then exit.

2. Go to your task bar, right click, Task Manager. Go to Performance Tab. Under commit charge, check what is the Peak.

3. If your Peak is higher than 1GB, then you'd be better off get "cheap" 2GB memory.

4. If your Peak is lower than 1GB, then it's good to get performance 1GB memory.

Sounds logical to you?

Some might label me a conspiracy theorist, but I have a dman strong feeling that software companies are purposely setting the requirements damn high, just so the hardware manufacturers can make profit. Hell, they probably don't even optimize their software for minimal hardware requirements.

Obviously, that's how the IT industry work. Hw and sw companies works hand in hand to screw consumers by creating new hw/sw with higher requirements while making older stuff obsolete with no support thus forcing you to buy new hw/sw.

btw, Windoze98 will RIP this coming July 11 for good.

And i'm not suprised all those software are purposely bloated by eating up more  memory than needed and refusing to deallocate them to create the illussion of hw requirement. Hey, they might even add in another 1 million loops that do nothing for every new version of sw released other than slowing down your computer just to force you to upgrade to faster CPU!!!