Using a reasonable OS (Linux etc), 4GB is absolutely fine for browsing and basic tasks, and indeed is often fine for development and other more-than-basic tasks as well, depending on how exactly you work (Emacs/Vim instead of an IDE, for instance).

Is 4GB considered too little under Windows these days?

It amazes me no end that when I turned 18 I was contracted to work on a Cray J90 with a staggering 128 Mwords of RAM at a financial institution, and that today 4GB is considered tight for running a consumer OS with a browser with more than a few tabs open.

I really cannot fathom what could possibly require so much memory. It’s just taking some hypertext markup, some scripts, and rendering a web-page.

I genuinely do not understand. I’m totally baffled.

and I think back to the old B6700 ... for which we bought 1.5Mb of core (yes, actual hand threaded core) for $1M in the late 70s ..... it supported 40 terminals

Abstraction upon abstraction running containers inside VMs, basically turtles all the way down.

4GB is terrible under Windows 10 (you'll be swapping all the time, which means either visibly thrashing if running a spinning disk, or wearing out a SSD with excess writes). 8GB is considered a mildly tolerable amount, and 16GB is almost the standard for "real" use. Yet under Linux, even as little as 2GB can make for an incredibly snappy and productive experience. Go figure.

More or less. The main culprit is web browsers. Chrome will happily use 4gb by itself these days...

Heh, Firefox doesn't have that problem at all. I don't think I have pulled more than 1 GB on it? But then again I usually only have 10-20 tabs open at the most.

The Great Suspender is life.

For reference, I have a Thinkpad x200 with 8 GB of RAM (it has an Intel Core 2 Duo). I installed Debian with XFCE, and it idles at 300 MB of Ram, and I have yet to use more than 1.5 GB of RAM. I say that to say I think 4 GB of RAM is plenty if you use it for casual computing tasks.

I use a 2011 Dell Vostro w/ 4GB RAM and a 2010 era Core i3 as my media machine, hooked up to my TV. Handles 1080P Youtube/Netflix and Acestream streams very well.

"4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks."

Yes, it does.

Typing this on a 2GB Thinkpad T42p which seems to work just fine for browsing and basic tasks - and then some.

I use OpenBSD with cwm, Iridium, nvi and Unix utilities as my "IDE".

I lack nothing.