how much RAM does Ubuntu need to sleep?

[Me - Atlantic]

On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 13:27 -0400, boricua wrote:
[snip]
> can you do ps aux|grep -i python
> 

hplip     6989  0.0  0.1   8856  1304 ?        S    Jul03   0:04
python /usr/sbin/hpssd
john      7691 17.5 68.7 1481404 712036 ?      S    Jul03 621:16
python /usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-daemon

I don't have any idea what hpssd is, but it seems that gdesklets is the
culprit... 

But on my laptop (also running 5.10), the same command yields - 
john 12018 2.7 5.6 31856 14556 ? S Jun30 206:04
python /usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-daemon

Why would the desktop take up 4 times the resource of the laptop?