Pretty sure you can't upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit, it needs a fresh install...

That's what I meant by update ...

If it's a 1720, they were supplied with 3GB of RAM. I guess there would have been no point in giving them 4GB.

Have you thought of putting an SSD in instead of the memory upgrade? It's the best upgrade you can do on an old laptop, and pretty cheap nowadays.

Its a 1320 - as you say it may have been supplied, with 3GB as I don't remember doing an upgrade for her. I will soon have a spare SSD too, and had already planned that. A quick clone of the old drive will sort it.

Yep - they came from Dell with 3GB as well.

My Windows 10 boot is 1.2 Gig. My Win 7 boot is 0.8 Gig.

Tried stopping unnecessary stuff loading? Should be able to get any boot down to 1.5 Gig. Also, you could use features such as Readyboost and have a 16GB SSD sitting there as a cache between the RAM and the HDD.

Or set swapfile to a minimum of 4/8GB, and no maximum, which should reduce HDD swap resizing.

As to the RAM, it's just old, so pricey. There's always Ebay, and take a chance.

Edit: Read further down, and there's a chance of 32-bit. Not sure how that affects Readyboost, but my guess would be the old 3.xx GB limit (I forget what it is).

Suggest you do what you can of this list, within the 32-bit context - https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/t/4227430-...

Edited by camieabz (Tue 03-Nov-20 18:36:38)

SSD would not solve RAM being overutilised but might help speed up swap files so could still make some difference.

If you can't do a 64bit install as an upgrade (haven't tried one as I always do fresh installs for that sort of thing) then going about 3GB is going to make no difference - you need 64bit to get any benefit from the extra RAM.

EDIT : OK, confirmed you can't do in situ upgrade so even if you upgrade the RAM you will have to do a clean install. If you are even considering this route then doing a clean 64bit install now may improve things without needing the extra RAM.

Edited by ian72 (Wed 04-Nov-20 10:13:35)

3 GB is plenty of RAM for normal applications. With a slow hard disk Windows 10 does tend to get bogged down with indexing and virus checking; an SSD does away with this. Unless the OP has definitely determined that the disk activity is down to excessive use of the page file I would suggest that speeding the disk access is the best initial route; for me this has made unusable computers seem fast. I've never had a computer yet that performed well with Windows 10 if it only had a mechanical disk.

The best way to check what is happening is to have a look with Resource Monitor as to which applications are using the disk, how many page faults there are, etc. Turning off indexing on the disk also helps.

3GB should be enough (Win 10 can actually run on 1GB) but the OP states

memory is running at 90% or more

There is an issue there. A fresh install could fix it but they don't want to do that. 64bit could fix it but that would also be a fresh install. Other than that there could be some investigative work to find what is using the memory but that is something that isn't easy to diagnose via a forum like this. Installing an SSD will only cover up the issue to some extent.