2gb worth of ram should do the trick for the time being. Maybe a year or so down the road (pending on the OS market) you may have to eithe rbuy a new PC or change motherboards. RAM itself is pretty cheap. I bought 4gb of DDR2 RAM from a company in Ireland and it was about 108 including shipping and handling.

I have 1 GB max and it's still enough for average games, take Spore for example, it requires min. 512 MB. I can't play them though because of my processor, but that's off topic. Even games like Crysis take min. 1GB... You have the double.

You have nothing to worry about for this year and next, especially if you have XP. Most PCs today have 2-3 GB RAM in them and it's enough for now.

I have 2 GB and that's perfectly fine for Crysis and other games, but I certainly wouldn't mind adding another 2. But I think my AMD X2 4400+ will limit me, so I might get a new processor first.

Wow. Lots of misinformation here. 2GB is pretty much the standard amount right now. 4GB is becoming more popular as Vista adoption grows, but it's still less common than 2GB.

If you're running Windows XP (32bit), you're limited to a maximum of 3.25GB anyway. Really, the time to switch will be when/if you decide to switch to Vista (or 64 bit XP). Vista is much more memory hungry than XP, so moving to 4GB+ makes a much bigger difference there.

As for how long you can hold out, I'd say you're good for at least a year, maybe two (again, assuming you run 32bit XP). With Vista's lack luster reception, a lot of people are still running 32bit operating systems, and game makers know it. It's going to be a couple years before any significant amount of games really require 4GB of RAM or more. And when that does happen, those games will require Vista (or the upcoming Windows 7), so you'll have a clear sign for when to upgrade.

2GB isn't much anymore and can be considereed the "base" amount needed for a decent game on medium settings these days.

Ideally you need 4GB, definately need 3GB at least if your running Vista....Vista gets a lot of bad press because it actually needs 4GB to run optimally...It doesn't feel nice with just 2GB once you've got a load of little utilities and what not loaded at start up.

If you've got an old Athlon processor and you want to upgrade to 4GB you're best of just ditching it and getting a cheap Core 2 Duo setup and overclocking.

3-4GB is optimum for Vista.
More than that is really unwarranted as there aren't any games supporting 64 bits at this point and that should be enough Ram for the foreseable future...

 No they don't.

To use more than 4 GB on Vista you need a 62 bits app and processor........

I'm looking at a Best Buy flyer and a Future shop flyer right now and they have computers with 5gb, 6gb and 8gb of ram.

Some of you are funny and way to into cutting edge.

2gb is definitely not 'future proof' by any means. However, only the most powerful games now require that or more, say Crysis. The greater majority of games now require 1gb max to play, like C&CRed Alert 3(1gb), Spore(512mb), CoD4(1gb) etc.

I currently have a pc I just built a few months ago and I only put 2gb into it. Granted, I can up grade to 8gb, but, i will wait until I actually needs to as the prices will only go down.

If you are not looking at a game now or really soon that has a requirement for >2gb I wouldn't worry about it until then as the price of Ram and computers in general drop pretty quickly.

EDIT: The reason most new computer need >2gb is due to Vista and nothing else.

EDIT2: I just look up Crysis it requires 1gb and says 1.5gb for recommended. So, even with one of the most intense games out now 2gb is still more than enough.

Which are totally useless for gaming........