I got my work PC bumped from 0.5 GiB to 3.0 GiB about 9 months ago. As part of a security measure, we have to maintain a separation between corporate and production networks. That presents a problem for those of us that actually have to do work in both. The solution was to use VMWare. I did the pilot (i.e. I was the guinea pig) and my recommendation was to have at least 2 GiB of RAM for anyone doing this since we do Java stuff, and Java can be a pig.

The nice thing is that we are allowed to run whatever OS we want in the VM, so some of us are now running Linux, and one guy is trying out Solaris. The only thing I flip back to Windows for now is email.