Thanks very much for your fast answer farss, you confirm the intention I had to put 16 GB.( I always prefer to confirm with the pross)
Is not really very cheap, but much more than a few months ago.

If cost is a consideration and I know RAM for laptops has a premium price then I'd suggest 8GB should be adequate. If you find it isn't then upping it to 16GB using 3rd party RAM after you've bought the machine should not be that difficult and probably cheaper as well.

Bob.

I own a Dell Studio Laptop with 8Gig of RAM installed and it handles my HD editing needs quite well wth Vegas 11.....Just make sure the laptop you order has a dedicated grahics card and not the onboard graphcs....also keep in mind 3rd party RAM can be had much cheaper in price than what dell offers so get the bare minimum RAM offered in your laptop deal and replace it elsewhere...

How much does Dell want for the RAM? My experience is that buying RAM separately is a whole lot cheaper. I just put 16gGB in my Lenovo for abou $85. Buying the computer with that much RAM would have cost several hundred dollars. I would go to an online RAM seller and see how much they would charge for the same amount of RAM. My guess is that it will be significantly cheaper.

What Laurence said.
Just make sure the configuration you order from Dell has an open memory slot so you can upgrade yourself.
Or, and I've done this, just order with the minimum they offer and pull both sticks and replace with a matched pair. Sell the Dell memory on e-bay as "original Dell memory" and they seem to sell at a decent price.
Memory is one of those options where Dell kills you on the upgrade price.

Everybody uses ECC RAM? - few pennies more but soo much more safe.

With Gigabytes (1000 of millions of bytes) of RAM this should be a must whenever possible.

1) In general, you buy as much RAM as you can fit into the PC - it provides you with more preview RAM.
2) You can go to any of the big third-party RAM companies like Crucial or patriot and let them scan your PC to recommend the optimum RAM configuration.
3) Does your motherboard even support ECC? Most consumer-level boards don't

As Steve says, most consumer boards don't support ECC. In fact, I think if the PC supports ECC then you might not be able to use non-ECC.

I was just thinking about some of the recent comments on this board about Vegas and it's use of RAM while driving to work this AM. It seems to me that what Vegas really needs is access to more than 2GB. There have been many comments that make me think that 8GB is more than enough.

In fact, I find that I can run Vegas plus three or four Adobe applications plus Outlook and Word and Excel and Firefox all on 6GB and not really feel any pain. So I'd say if your needs are like mine then 8GB is plenty.

I'm not sure what the cost is to take this PC up to 16GB but usually the DIMMs at the very top of the capacity range are disproportionately more expensive...but looking at the Crucial website it looks like 8GB SS-DIMMs aren't so bad compared to 4GB modules. When a DIMM size is new they can be more than 4x the cost of the next size down, but these are only a little more than double, which seems perfectly fair.

Rob

I have this formula for determining how much RAM to buy. It starts by analyzing how much RAM the PC will hold. You take this number and multiply it by the price it will take to bring you to this number. You subtract the total from how much limit you have left on your credit card. If this number is greater than zero, you go ahead and order it. At least that's how I did it.

The general recommendation is 2GB per core. So if you have a QuadCore, 8GB would be the preferred amount. You can have more, but I wouldn't go with less although I've seen 1GB per core work fine depending on how small your projects are but 2GB per core is the general rule.

~jr

I have 16GB on a 4 core i7, which is the maximum it will handle. I like being able to Shift-B large sections and do other things while Vegas is rendering. Also, if you do music, large amounts of memory let you buffer larger portions of the samples in RAM and significantly reduce the amount of hard disc access.

Also, any unused RAM just goes to Windows disc caching, which also significantly speeds things up.