Medion 17 inch Laptop

mavisangelica

I am tempted by this laptop as I am specifically looking for a 17inch lappy under £300. It will replace an ageing Dell PC and will be used forOffice 2010 and general browsing ( Facebook, Twitter, newspaper websites, some Youtube, etc).

http://www.medion.com/gb/shop/budget-laptops-medion-akoya-e7223-laptop-md98852-30017556a1.html?wt_mc=gb.intern.MegaFlyoutProduct.laptop_buying_guide.on-ma&wt_cc1=1_1&wt_cc3=DaySpecial

Medion have a handy laptop buying guide which I have looked at and think that the i3 processor is reasonable for what I want to do on it.

My question is though, is 4GB RAM enough? Or should I wait for an 8GB one to come up?

mavisangelica

Will 4GB RAM be enough if I was to upgrade to Windows 10 once I bought it?

Fightsback

You can always add extra memory, it isn't difficult or expensive.

John_Gray

mavisangelica wrote: »

Will 4GB RAM be enough if I was to upgrade to Windows 10 once I bought it?

If you wanted to use 32-bit Windows 10, that would be as much memory as 32-bit could see.

If you wanted to use 64-bit Windows 10, then that would work fine, unless you had programs which used huge amounts of memory. I couldn't find any indication in the specifications of the maximum memory capacity of the laptop.

Also note that the screen resolution is 1600 x 900.

NiftyDigits

4 GB of RAM will be more than adequate for Windows 10. It can accept up to 8 GB of RAM.

mavisangelica

Thanks all. I am just about to buy it - hubby is insistent that we get a 17" and at that price I will give it a go and upgrade the RAM if necessary.

bod1467

NiftyDigits wrote: »

4 GB of RAM will be more than adequate for Windows 10. It can accept up to 8 GB of RAM.

Pedant-mode-ON .... I presume you mean the laptop will accept up to 8GB .. Windows 10 will happily run with much more RAM than 8GB.

NiftyDigits

bod1467 wrote: »

Pedant-mode-ON .... I presume you mean the laptop will accept up to 8GB .. Windows 10 will happily run with much more RAM than 8GB.

Yes, the laptop. It, currently, holds 4GB of DDR3-1600

Ben84

John_Gray wrote: »

If you wanted to use 32-bit Windows 10, that would be as much memory as 32-bit could see.

If you wanted to use 64-bit Windows 10, then that would work fine, unless you had programs which used huge amounts of memory. I couldn't find any indication in the specifications of the maximum memory capacity of the laptop.

Also note that the screen resolution is 1600 x 900.

32bit operating systems limit the user to 4gb user addressable memory, which includes graphics card memory as well as RAM. So if your graphics card has its own memory, you'd be using even less of the 4gb RAM.

Anyway, I appreciate you've given a complete answer, but it's worth adding that 32bit vs 64bit isn't really a thing to worry about these days. The few people who need 32bit, for example to run some essential (and ancient!) 16bit applications know who they are, everyone else shouldn't need to worry about it. 64bit is the right one for them.

RAM is easy enough and fairly cheap to upgrade later, so it's one thing you can worry less about when buying a computer as unlike many things, it's easily changed if needed. There's various programs you can use to monitor RAM usage, which will show if you're regularly running out of RAM and could benefit from adding more. However, unless the computer is performing badly, there's no need to look for problems.

rockan

I did some beta testing on an old laptop I had with 4gig of ram and it ran perfectly. As mentioned above it's very cheap to upgrade a laptops ram these days. (I've bought broken laptops for under £40 on eBay just to take the ram / HD' out of them