Memory

New laptop arrived today ! But has just 4GB of memory installed as the manufacturer wanted £60 for another 4GB

From Crucial, I can get another 4GB for £15 or if I want to go up to 16GB it will be just £55

For most activities 4GB is plenty - the most memory intensive applications I use are Photoshop Elements and SilkyPix developer for Pentax DSLRs. The video card has its own memory so do not use the system RAM.

So, should I go to 8GB or 16GB ? Will I ever need all 16GB?

Who knows what the requirements will be, or the applications you'll be running in 3-5 years. That's assuming you expect to be using it for that long.

I'd certainly go for more memory and am inclined to think total of 8GB would be a good compromise.

I assume it will be two sticks (dual channel)?

Generally I avoid filling all the slots of a mobo with memory, but with lappies it's harder. I would go with the most you are prepared to pay. Modern Windows systems will use as much as you can throw at them, caching for faster running.

One thing. I tend to set my swapfile to be static, but with plenty of space. I run 4GB. Windows Vista (no idea about Win7) will set the minimum swapfile as 1.5 times the memory (6GB - 6144MB), with no maximum. I manually set mine to 1.0x the memory (4GB - 4096MB) and 1GB above this as the max (5GB - 5120MB). It stops resizing, but you sacrifice disk space. The only other caveat is that the MB amount set is divisible by the file format (probably 64 in your case, but maybe 32 for all I know).

If you get 16GB, your swapfile will be 16GB (16384MB) to 17GB (17408MB). Crazy stuff, but windows requires the memory quantity as minimum or it throws up warnings due to a lack of memory dump space.

Bear that one in mind when choosing your memory quantity. It might be that Windows won't need all that. Monitor the system-managed swapfile for a bit to see what it's set at.

Edited by camieabz (Wed 21-Nov-12 18:48:50)

I should add that if you're using a SSD, you should swot up on swapfiles for SSDs and refer to the OS-specific issues. I don't use SSDs.

In reply to a post by MHC:

..... So, should I go to 8GB or 16GB ? Will I ever need all 16GB?

If you don't buy it while it's cheap, you'll almost certainly need it. If you do buy it, you'll probably never use it.
Sod's Law.

May I ask that are you using 32-bits or 64-bits OS?? Bearing in mind that 32-bits OS will only support up to 4GB only due to memory addressing issues, regardless of more than 4GBs of physical memories have actually been installed. It is only 64-bits OS can see your 4GBs plus physical memories if installed. Of cause you may still install more than 4GBs of memory even if you are using 32-bits OS for future proofing purposes!

That's similar to my way of thinking!

64 bit ...

I have a couple of PCs here - still in use, which run XP but can only support 1GB as the motherboard was designed that way! They are painfully slow to use.

For general home usage, 1Gig on an XP box is quite acceptable.

It is a business machine!