Why should an average consumer put up with this? I'm running some common applications on my machine.

• Adobe Photoshop CS (496MB)
• Firefox (260 MB)
• Harmony Remote control software (233 MB)
• Visual Studio 2005 (157 MB)
• Adobe Illustrator (70 MB)
• Microsoft Outlook (53 MB)

Walking through the top RAM consumers on my PC, we start with Photoshop. I have 3 basic documents open, with very few entries in the history and only a handful of layers. I routinely find I need to shut down Photoshop to eliminate a general ever growing application footprint. Next up Firefox. I have 16 active tabs. Why do 16 separate web pages require over 256 MB of RAM? My guess is there's a set of nasty bugs leaking memory. It's the latest build. Next up, and the absolute worst offender overall is the HarmonyClient. This is the software that Logitech installs to manage the Harmony remote control I own. Most annoyingly, I don't have the remote plugged in! It's just sitting there, ever growing. (To add insult to that, the HarmonyClient software is a terrible piece of software from a usability perspective). Visual Studio is up next -- I think it too has a problem -- it seems to grow and grow and grow. It's not uncommon that I need to restart it to free some memory on my machine at work. Illustrator is suprisingly low actually given that I do have some open documents and have been working with it. Outlook at 53 MB doesn't shock me given how many messages I have open and the total size of my e-mail store.

The only reason I went to look is that Photoshop complained there was insufficent memory to complete an operation. That's unusual on my machine as I have 2 GB of RAM installed.

What's the average consumer to do? Demand better! Post bugs/complaints in forums. Don't settle for buggy software. You shouldn't have to. Take your money elsewhere. Open source clearly isn't any better than purchased software.

Developers: Assume that users will leave your software running far longer than you expect. So that little nagging memory leak that you know about can turn into a massive leak over the course of several weeks. I hardly ever shut my computer down -- when I'm not using it, I leave it in standby or hibernate (if the latter happens to work).