At what point would laptop benefit from more RAM?

paulri

paulri

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I have 8 gigs of RAM on my Lenovo Thinkpad E555. It is 5 yo but still runs fairly well, but occasionally I notice delays when right-clicking on a file (a delay in seeing the context menu appear), or when typing an email. Even restarting the browser doesn't change the delay between typing a character and the 3-5 seconds gap when I see it in the email itself.

I look in the Task Manager, and I have 600-650 megs of RAM free/available. This is a bit over 5% of my overall RAM.

My question--if I upgrade to 16 gigs (the limit), would I see a speed increase? Or does the 600 megs that are free, mean that anything more would not be noticed?
 
How big is the drive, how full is it, and is it an SSD drive or an older HDD/platter type?

RAM is nice, but it isn't always the best use of upgrade $$.

What kind of background apps (or open apps) are you running? 5% seems awfully tight. I have a slightly older 4 series thinkpad similar to yours, only 8gb total RAM. It's at 50% with excel, a browser with four or five windows open, and all my background apps.
 
The answer is maybe. I tend to go bigger on my RAM to try and keep the use of the swap file down which tends to be a slow process, especially if it's a traditional platter-based HD. The second thing I do is get SSDs so if the system needs to swap the process is as fast as possible. I find 16GBs is the sweet spot.
 
I have a 500 gig SSD, about 150 gigs free space available.

That drive holds my program and all my data files.

I typically have Firefox with three tabs open, as well as 2 versions of MS Edge browser open, with a grand total of some 20 tabs open usually at the same time, some times even more, but Edge puts unused tabs to sleep, so I would think that this wouldn't chew up too much ram. MS Word is almost alwasy open, with 5 docs or so, and a few other programs open, occasionally running (like Spotify app).

Oro_O said:
How big is the drive, how full is it, and is it an SSD drive or an older HDD/platter type?

RAM is nice, but it isn't always the best use of upgrade $$.

What kind of background apps (or open apps) are you running? 5% seems awfully tight. I have a slightly older 4 series thinkpad similar to yours, only 8gb total RAM. It's at 50% with excel, a browser with four or five windows open, and all my background apps.
Click to expand...
 
Yes, it might speed things up. The bottleneck you have right now is that your RAM might be spiking at full use and causing the computer to use the SSD for pagefiles/virtual RAM while also trying to read from the SSD to open the program. 16 GB is really where most computers should be these days, IMO, at a minimum. I might be mistaken, but I think some of the RAM out of your total is always set aside for critical tasks? Could be maxing out even if it doesn't appear to be doing so?
 
I just checked and with four Chrome tabs and two other lightweight programs open I'm at 8.8 GB of RAM used out of 64 GB on RAM on my Win10 desktop.

Since you have an SSD more RAM is probably the way to go.
 
OK, I think I'll upgrade with one 8gig stick (and keep one of my 4 gig sticks), and take that for a year or two max, before my next laptop purchase.

Since I have your attention, there's nothing wrong with 1x4 plus 1x8 gigs is there? As long as the two are compatible with the motherboard? I go to crucial.com to find out what I need.
 
windows will use available ram to cache.. what is the ram use not counting cache?

that being said if you can throw in another 8GB for a few bucks it wouldnt be a bad idea.

web browsers can be hogs.. esp with 20 pages open
 
I am not sure if mixing ram will allow you to do Dual Channel or not, you need to check your computer spec.

Also check Newegg.com for ram once you find out what you need.
Sometimes, buying 2x8 gb is not 2x the price of 8 gb.
 
paulri said:
I typically have Firefox with three tabs open, as well as 2 versions of MS Edge browser open, with a grand total of some 20 tabs open usually at the same time, some times even more, but Edge puts unused tabs to sleep, so I would think that this wouldn't chew up too much ram. MS Word is almost alwasy open, with 5 docs or so, and a few other programs open, occasionally running (like Spotify app).
Click to expand...
Yes, you need more ram...
 
More RAM and less disc swap file action will help keep the SSD life up. I added 8 GB of RAM to my laptop and now have 16 GB total. I've had 120 tabs open in Firefox before, and the RAM useage was still less than 60%.

Wish Firefox would put inactive tabs to sleep like Egde does. If Firefox eats up too much RAM, you can close it and re-open it (all the same tabs come back) and it will release some RAM. I need to do that on my older desktop with only 8 GB of RAM.
 
Going from 1 stick to 2 also means the memory bandwidth double. It won't double your speed but typically my experience say they do make a 10-20% improvement alone. Since you are within 5% of your ram limit you will definitely get some improvement going from 8 to 16GB.
 
JMJNet said:
I am not sure if mixing ram will allow you to do Dual Channel or not, you need to check your computer spec.

Also check Newegg.com for ram once you find out what you need.
Sometimes, buying 2x8 gb is not 2x the price of 8 gb.
Click to expand...
I don't think so.

However since OP already has 8GB it make sense to pick another 8GB instead of another 2 or 4GB, and take advantage of dual channel.
 
I currently have 2x4. I am thinking about cheaping out here, and just getting 1x8 and 1x4. It would be 35-40, instead of 80-90. I only want this laptop for another year or two years max.
 
OK two of you have mentioned "dual channel." Will I lose the advantages of dual channel if both sticks are not the same number of gigs?

Here are my specs for the laptop from Speccy:

Speccy.png
 
OK, but why? At this point it is 5 years old. I just want to extend its life by a year or two, before buying its replacement. Apart from this, it is functioning fairly smoothly. I really can't justify a new laptop because of need, so I just want to make it faster for a year or so.

If I were keeping it over the long term, I could see getting more.

Is there a performance problem with 1x4 plus 1x8?

Danno said:
www.notebookcheck.net

Lenovo ThinkPad E555 Notebook Review

In-depth review of the Lenovo ThinkPad E555 (AMD Kaveri A8-7100, AMD Radeon R5 (Kaveri), 15.6", 2.4 kg) with numerous measurements, benchmarks and evaluations
www.notebookcheck.net www.notebookcheck.net
This piece talks about benefits of using dual channel memory mode.
If it was my laptop, I would go 2x8gb matching modules.
Click to expand...
 
Speed comes from having enough RAM so you can read and write without swapping them in and out of SSD. It comes in handy if you have a bit extra. 8G in theory should be ok if you are doing things the right way but if you don't like to close things and uninstall bloat then you will be wasting some speed on swapping.

Typically if you use a lot of memory the CPU will try to access more than just what you want and cache them inside the CPU, it helps if it cache more in parallel at a time so dual channel will help a bit more than single channel, usually what I experienced is 5-20%. However if you are low on RAM and going from 8 to 12GB, then yes, it would yield a bigger boost than staying with 8GB as 2 x 4GB.

Computer these days don't speed up much more than 5-10% a year because we have 1) a monopoly who refuse to invest in new FABs (Intel) and 2) we have hit some bottleneck in physics, power consumption in leakage is actually preventing us from doubling speed every 18 months like the old days.

I'm still using a 4 year old laptop for work full time, we won't upgrade anytime soon. If I were you I'd just get 16GB and run it for another 3 years. However that's me. If you want to buy 8GB and switch to 12GB it will work too. I did that for my mom, and by the time if she need more than 12GB I'll buy 1 more 8GB and upgrade her to 16GB. It won't hurt much anyways.
 
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