Remember that this particular calculation is one that has a significant computational load. So don't judge Mathematica based on it if this is your beginning experience. I will set the computation running later on when I don't need to see how long it takes. Also, since there are dynamic interactive elements to that CDF, avoid scrolling down to them (they only attempt to format and evaluate when on the screen) while this particular computation is running since it is so very CPU-intensive.
8 Gb should be enough for you to do significant work with Mathematica in general. You'd only need to optimize more if you are going to be solving things like 30000 simultaneous equations ... ;-)
