Hardware requirement for PI 7.1 SDN subscription

Hello,

has any developer installed PI 7.1 on a notebook or PC for development purpose only (SDN subscription, no productive use, just for learning) and can give me a hint if 4 GB RAM will really be enough (DB,ABAP and Java running on the same machine).

I installed PI 7.1 on a PC which has 3 GB, unfortunately an XP 32bit host, so I created a SLES 10 64bit virtual machine, but the system takes much too long for each request, regardless if ABAP or Java. The reason is that I see PI is eating about 3 - 3.5 GB RAM (DB, ABAP and Java stack, Java by far the most RAM), which I obviously do not have in the VM. So it is constantly swapping and unusable.

On the SDN subscription page, 4 GB RAM are recommended, but also 15 GB HD, which is not true for PI 7.1, it needs much more HD space on installation (about 10 GB + 36 GB database if I remember correctly). So I wonder if 4 GB will really be enough, even if that will be a single user environment only for learning.

Any hints from practice ? Because 8 GB for notebook is very expensive (needs 4 GB modules), I wonder if I should take a 4 GB notebook, or better an 8 GB normal PC to make sure RAM is ok.

No hints about the quick sizer tool please.

CSY