> out right away.  I run on 128 megs of ram with a win98 vm
> set with 64 megs and almost never hit swap.   I don't do much

Windows is a poor memory manager.  Even with 128MB of RAM Windows is still using
VM and swapping stuff out before it has used up all of the Physical RAM.

> graphics work but most of the high end graphics work I have
> seen have had a minimum of 256 megs ram.  It seems like a lot

From info off the Lightwave mailing list (Windows 3d application), it is
recommended that for graphics work you should have 128MB of RAM per processor
minimum.

> to me but I guess when images are 10-30 megs compressed they
> really take up a lot of ram when being worked on.

-- 
"Intel giveth and Microsoft Taketh Away" - Gordon Moore