N Boy -

Your £285 is close to the top of what would be considered "consumer grade" machines here, and there probably are some at about that price with more than two slots for RAM and BIOS suport for more RAM. That's not the case in that price range for most of those available in my markets.

The bigger problem is that while most sellers tell you how much RAM is installed, they say nothing about what MAXIMUM amount can be installed in their up-front specs. You have to dig really deep to find it, which means you have be aware that it could be something you'd care about.

Video is certainly one thing that needs a little more RAM but there are other things that push the requirements quite a bit more. OCR on large documents is one thing: Runing OCR on a 500 page "image only pdf" generally raises a flag on my machine showing "High Usage of Processor" at about page 370. There's no crash from that, but it indicates something other than the program itself needs more space than I have.

Any time the RAM space is pushed to the limit, the computer should be flipping memory segments in and out of virtual RAM (temp files on the hard drive) and unfortunately the process that keeps track of what goes in and out has to use more and more of the real RAM in order to not lose its mind. That appears to be one of the things I encounter frequently with 8GB RAM. (Win98 warned that installing more than 1MB ram could make the file manager eat more RAM than you added above that.)

A difference between how FAT formatted drives keep track of files and how its done with NTFS apparently is RAM intensive, with high requirements for "background processes," so the sheer number of files on all the drives connected, with some effect from what range of file sizes are there, affects how well Windows Explorer can keep track of what's going on. This can result in failure of Explorer to show what files are in a folder, or even to show that it's "pointing at" a different folder than it desplays as the target when you paste something. I get frequent "Windows Explorer has stopped working" messages, because the folder I tried to copy from didn't show the files actually in that folder so there's a crash when it tries to do something with something that doesn't exist.

While it's purely speculation, it looks like my 8GB of RAM isn't sufficient for the "background processes" needed to keep the File Control Block current. This problem is most often reported by "heavyweight PhotoShop users" and I'm not in that category. My guess is that it's not because of high RAM requirements for PhotoShop, but mostly because lots of photographers handle batches of files in bulk bunches and the large number of files all changed within a short time outruns the file manager. That's something I do - a lot.

On the main topic of the thread, I don't see a way that this can't be a worse problem with Win8 (and for those who use the latest toy tricks in Win7 etc) since the demand that you should use "Libraries" for all your file management means that the actual files aren't in the library, which is just a sorted(?) mirror of the real hardware file locations, so every file transaction has to look in the library to find where to look in the FCB to find where get the file. And every change requires an update of the FCB and of the Library both of which are background processes that you can't force to be done instantly. They only happen when the processor is idle and "feels like doing it."

I REFUSE to use the libraries (because they're worthless for me, although they might be okay for the children). I haven't REMOVED them as yet in my Win7 since it's a little complex to get it done, but probably will soon.

John