You can get away with 4GB of RAM. I my experience (I worked for 5 different companies, all financial services, all London), I have never seen a desktop with more than 4GB of RAM, mostly because most established companies run on 32bit Windows.

Every company has some legacy and/or proprietary piece of software than only runs on 32bits. Even some Excel plugins and Macros can't be/are too expensive to move to 32bit Windows. I've seen companies looking into it but it would lead to too much downtime and disruption that it was always abandoned.

And I haven't seen a company buy a 32-bit Windows machine in several years. With the switch to Windows 7, all the companies I've worked for or with have bought 64-bit machines with 4GB (up to 2011) or 8GB.

Currently we have 8GB as the minimum, 16GB seems to be average and the power users get 32GB (AutoCAD).

Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

We're going to go for Dell i5s with 8GB of RAM. That should give plenty of power now and scope for upgrades as and when they become necessary. Just got to get the laptop users to decide on size/weight ratios and screen sizes for the desktop users.

As was said on the firs page, do yourself a favour and go with SSDs.

Currently we buy machines with normal HDDs and then get an SSD from our supplier and transplant the SSD into the machine, before it goes to the user. This usually works out significantly cheaper than buying an SSD model directly (although if you are going laptop, some can't be swapped out these days). But either way, the SSD makes a huge improvement.

I have a 7 year old Sony Vaio and it was getting pretty long in the tooth. I slapped in a 500GB SSD and, even though it is only a SATA-2 interface, it is still nearly as quick as the 2015 Surface Pro 3 I had.

Get the SSD's factory fitted. It's not much difference and that makes them covered by the warranty.

On the desktops we use, the difference is usually around 200€ and we get 250GB Samsung EVOs for around 70€. The Fujitsu notebooks we get now come with SSD as standard in the configuration we want - funnily enough, the more expensive model, with Core i7 processor comes with spinning rust, go figure...