Possible? I spotted a Lenovo at Best Buy, amd10, 8 gig 1 tb for 379, but I'm wondering if I could do better on the price, I'm not sure if it maybe more computer than I need. I'd like all the hard drive space, but do I need that much ram for cruising the net and YouTube and such?
Joey
You'll never regret having too much ram.
8 gigs is pretty much the minimum to run Windows 10 without bogging down every time you have more than one window open, especially with dynamic content like YouTube or fancy websites. I always put 16 in my systems.
I wouldn't consider anything less than 8gb ram for a windows computer.
8GB is the sweet spot. I have 16GB and can open 100+ tabs in chrome and not break 8GB. Short of professional work in autocad, photoshop, or the odd 64 bit game that a $300 laptop isn't going to run, 8GB is plenty and adding more isn't going to speed things up much.
MCarp22 wrote: ... adding more isn't going to speed things up much.
Right now. In 24 months, 16GB may very well be the minimum to keep newer software running well. For surfing and general web viewing, though, the reasonable minimum (8GB) is probably good for several years.
Thanks guys. Are the players all pretty the same in the sub 400 dollar range? Lenovo vs asus vs hp etc?
Man what are you guys doing that needs more than 8GB of RAM? I ask this as a person who uses photo editing software, runs the most memory-hungry browser with a million tabs, runs VMs and emulators and plays high-end games. I used to have 12GB and I never used it all. Got a new mobo with less slots and had to go down to 8GB, still had a hard time using it all. I wouldn't recommend going under 6GB with a 64bit OS but right now 12GB is more than enough, and 16GB is just excessive.
Edit: My best guess is that you're being bitten by Windows' idiotic swap management, which always uses the swap file no matter how much RAM you have, and upgrading the RAM barely makes a dent in the performance hit this causes. Just disable the swap file if you have 8GB or more, the PC will go way faster.
Spoke to a guy at MS once about it and he said it's set up that way to avoid a sudden change in performance when RAM fills up. To me, that's like having a pickup truck drag the brakes all the time so that it doesn't suddenly feel slower when you're towing a boat.
You'll need to log in to post.
