512 MB RAM is way too little.

And let me tell you why. First things first: I run a MacBook with Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz, a 55GB HD and 512 RAM. Pretty decent. Except that Tiger, or Mac OS X.4.something is a fairly heavy load OS to run. Native OS X applications are totally stable. Stuff that runs on top of the X11 layer, such as Sparky and GIMP 2.2 are also stable, if sometimes a leetil slow. The problem is Firefox. Someone told me that Firefox has an undocumented memory leak which makes it further unstable the longer it stays active. Now Firefox stays on ALL the time. Consequence, my whole system is slowed down. And when I try running something like MS Office, everything comes to a standstill. I tried doing things to trim the basic load, like reducing my dock to a bare minimum of 7 items. I never use iPhoto, or any heavy load graphics package (I have Illustrator CS2). I have most of the dashboard widgets disabled. I even have the funneling effect disabled (less graphics: less CPU). I don't run Eudora or Thunderbird... I use Pine to check mail. Most of my work is at the command prompt. Still slow. This week, my sys-ad was nice enough to do a limited reinstall, without scrubbing the HD. Home directory intact. Not too much help. I need 2 GB of RAM.