Windows 10. 4gb or 8gb memory?

Head_The_Ball

Hi, my wife's laptop is an Acer ES1-411. I am currently using it as my own laptop has failed and I find it very slow compared to my fast Acer 8935g with an SSD. It struggles to cope with more than a few web pages open.

It has an Intel Celeron N2840 2.16 GHz Dual-core processor, 2gb of DDR3L SDRAM memory and a 500gb disk. It runs Windows 10 Home 64 bit.

I have a spare SSD disk that I am going to put in it to replace the supplied hard disk. That should improve it at no cost to us.

It only has one memory slot with a maximum of 8gb supported so I can get either a 4gb Crucial chip for about £25 or an 8gb chip for about £45.

I expect upgrading from 2gb to 4gb to see a significant improvement. Is it worth paying the extra for 8gb or will the improvements from 4gb to 8gb be marginal?

She uses it only for basic stuff such as email, web browsing, WP, Skype etc. No gaming or other intensive stuff.

I am aware that opening up this laptop is tricky but I have seen a few videos on youtube that show how to remove the base to get at the disk and memory slots.

Thanks

Gloomendoom

I'm quite happily running Win 10 on two machines with 2Gb of ram.

kwikbreaks

An analogy ... if you put a V8 in a Ford Fiesta would you expect all the other components of the car enable you to make full use of it?

I have a low grade laptop running Win 10 with just 2GB of memory and it has no problems with having half a dozen or more pages open so if that really is your only complaint I doubt that memory alone is the problem.

AndyPix

You will likely see little or no differnece between 4 or 8 GB for the tasks that you outline

motorguy

I would go for the 4GB. The 8GB is not necessary.


I've an old Dell D620, I added an SSD, did a fresh install of Win10 and put in 4GB of RAM to replace the 2GB.


For info, with quite a few Chrome tabs open and maybe a word doc or two its using around 2.5GB of RAM.

Head_The_Ball

Thanks everyone. i will buy a 4gb memory module.

Hopefully an SSD and an extra 2gb will speed the laptop up a bit.

AndyPix

It will that .. SSD is the single best thing you can do to improve your PC's performance

Cisco001

I don't know if it is pricing error. But cheapest SODIMM DDR3 8GB is £24
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005MOWE9E/?!!!!!pcp0f-21
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007M538DW/?!!!!!pcp0f-21

Head_The_Ball

Cisco001 wrote: »

I don't know if it is pricing error. But cheapest SODIMM DDR3 8GB is £24
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005MOWE9E/?!!!!!pcp0f-21
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007M538DW/?!!!!!pcp0f-21

Thanks.

I will check those out and see if they are compatible. If yes, I might as well buy one.

grumpycrab

PS. I'm sure you used the Crucial scanner... http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/systemscanner
PS2. a clean install would also be a good idea (to your SSD); moving the existing 500GB disk to external caddy.

SouthUKMan

It's all about ensuring the components in a PC / laptop are balanced and compliment each other without one or more of them causing a bottleneck. I'm typing this reply on a Windows 10 64 bit Acer laptop that has 2Gb of memory. I've got several browser tabs open, office software open and a photo editor open. It's perfectly fine and doesn't feel slow to me. Given the specs of your computer and that you only want it for relatively light weight tasks, then 4Gb would be fine. Installing an SSD would indeed make a real world difference.