Memory is important

I have been working a lot recently, and, one of the most frequent frustrations with work is waiting on my computer. I think I have found the way to illustrate that my issues are with memory allocation on 32bit systems though, and am looking forward to moving my workstation to Windows 7. The reason is that I will be able to move to the 64bit version, and hopefully will be able to upgrade my ram to 8Gb. I have 8Gb at home, and it makes a couple of the projects I am working on fly so much faster. But, now on to the graphs. I use Cacti at work to monitor a few machines, and our router, so that I can have a record of statistics. As I was setting up the system, I found a way to set it up on my windows xp system, so I also track things like CPU utilization, and memory usage.
First, here is a pretty normal day, some web development, some IT management, maybe SSH for some database stuff or RDP for Server stuff. Nothing too taxing on my quad core machine.

And now the 14th, mostly the same stuff, probably with some extra image manipulation, PDF editing and creation, maybe some audio or video work as well. I love the CS4 master suite, though, I also hate some of the things it does.

And here is today, when I was editing video, animating, and editing audio all day. I kept having to wait, because I was paging too much data, and couldn't keep the processor supplied with the appropriate data from RAM.

If I had a cacti server at home I would post relevant comparisons, but, this machine runs Ubuntu, and only boots into Windows when I have to do something in it,but more often than not, its in linux. Though, I keep trying to get to the point of trying some other distros. I have been quite happy with Fedora 12 on my netbook, and I have a Gentoo install on this box, but, its the most bare of installs, really nothing more than a stage 3 tarball unpacked. But, there is a planned computer upgrade coming, probably a new motherboard, move the quad-core to that with its 8Gb of ram, and get some new 1.5Tb drives for it, then put the old dual core and its 4Gb of ram back in this, and turn this machine into a file-server, and put the more powerful machine into a more energy efficient power scheme. If I do that, I could see spending some more time tinkering with a source-based distribution. But, until that happens, I will not make any changes that keep me from having access to my computer for too long.