I've had way more than that open at a time. The only thing that ever crashes my Mac is MS Office (I should have never let that MS contaminant on there, but what can you do, that's what everyone I work with uses, so I need to use it too). That's actually a pretty light workload for me. When I used Macs exclusively, I'd have safari and mail open all the time, iTunes usually, Photoshop definitely, sometimes Illustrator as well, Word, EndNote and Excel, and sometimes Powerpoint. Then, just to give it a challenge, I'd open up StatView in OS 9 (that's one thing I'm glad to have a PC for...the stats packages on Macs are pretty sad, though I haven't had a chance to try JMP yet because it's just so expensive).