There are acouple situations where my systems memory needs have exceeded the supply. The most likely cases are running virtual machines and building cd/dvd images. Those things realistically take LOT’s of memory. I have a swap partition – I don’t recall the size right off. I have about 512 MB on the desktop and probably for what I do could use to double that. Swap space, of course, is what the operating system uses when all the physical memory (RAM) is used.