It's actually pretty ironic, my uncle owns a computer repair business, and so does my girlfriend's dad. The thing is, my uncle hates me, and admitting to your future father in law that you don't know something is a recipe for some verbal abuse for sure. One friend told me I need 16gb of ram, and one told me to get a mac.
Hence, I ran to you guys =)
-kevin
I'm running it just fine on 4 Gb. If you don't have a 64-bit operating system, anything above 4Gb is a waste anyway.
As a side note - obviously you know your future father-in-law better than I do, but if he's going to give you a bunch of crap over something like that, you'll likely have bigger problems with him down the road. Just sayin'.