To be on the safe side I have been using 1GB of RAM with my G4 867.. Is this overkill with OSX?

My major applications are FCP3, Photoshop 7, Golive 6 and VRWORX

Now I just got my mother to purchase a new iMac G4 800 with 512MB of RAM and running these applications on her machine, I can feel no real notable difference. If anything it seemed snappier.

And this was after installing a new zeroed, 40GB 7200rpm hd solely for System (10.1.4) and Applications on my Power Mac. (in addition to a 60GB - mp3s and hi res images, and a 80GB Multimedia HD for DV Capture)

I'm just stumped. I'm going to to take out 512mb of ram tomorrow and see if it makes any difference. I don't think it will. But I'll let you know what I find.

ken