more ram

[bluesfloyd]

hi,guys
I have a dell inspiron m5040 laptop, it seems to load web pages a bit on the slow side, I note its using 4 GB of ram at the moment, I believe I can add a further 4 GB of ram, do you guys think the upgrade to a total of 8 GB of ram would load web pages faster,
thanks for your time,
bluesfloyd,

 

[steaky360]

hi,guys
I have a dell inspiron m5040 laptop, it seems to load web pages a bit on the slow side, I note its using 4 GB of ram at the moment, I believe I can add a further 4 GB of ram, do you guys think the upgrade to a total of 8 GB of ram would load web pages faster,
thanks for your time,
bluesfloyd,

I don't think going from 4Gb to 8Gb will make much of a difference loading most web pages. There are lots of other potential causes for slow internets. Have you tried an alternative browser (i.e. if you use chrome, try firefox or vice versa etc.).

Is anything else slow on that laptop? Especially things related to the internet?

 

[MJSWARLORD]

Hi Bluesfloyd , a quick history leason for you , when 64bit pc first came out the lower priced ones struggled to do everything because a lot only came with 4gb ram and now with the more powerful operating systems such as windows 10 the problems caused by small amounts of ram are even greater . Heres the proof , i got a very expensive pcs rig with 16 gb ram and it goes like a rocket. I also have 2 cheap pc's with only 4bg ram and on one of them i have to look at the toolbar when typing a web address because i type and wait for the letters to appear , the same slow typing happens in my search box.You may also have noticed that you struggle to do something when a virus scan is running in the background. One final tip ALWAYS double your ram never got 50% say from 4gb to 6 gb.

 

[ubuysa]

You cannot tell whether you need more RAM just by looking at how much RAM is used. Windows is designed to use as much RAM as it can, this is a good thing because the CPU can only access program code and data that is already in RAM. Windows memory management is very efficient and effective, one example is the way Windows commits RAM pages to processes based on the RAM they have requested, and this counts as 'used' RAM, but none of that RAM is really used until the process actually writes to it. Thus a large chunk of apparently 'used' RAM is really empty and can be allocated to other higher priority processes should they need it.

The only reliable way to tell whether you don't have enough installed RAM is to see what your page fault rate is like. When you're short of RAM Windows steals pages that have not been referenced for some time and writes them out to the pagefile. If a process later references one of these pages it has to be paged in, this is called a page fault. The rate at which page faults are happening thus tells you whether you are running short of RAM.

You can see your overall page fault rate by starting the Windows Resource Monitor and looking at the heading line for the Memory section, the hard page fault rate shown there is your overall page in rate. If that is zero then you have plenty of installed RAM, if it's consistently non zero then you're likely short of RAM. How desperate that RAM shortage is is indicated by the value of the page fault rate, higher numbers indicate a more severe shortage of RAM.

All that said, I also agree that RAM shortage is not the likeliest cause of slow web browsing. The biggest cause of system slowdowns on systems with a hard disk is file fragmentation and an over full disk. I would suggest you do three things:

1. Run a junk files cleaner to remove the junk files on your drive. You can use the Windows Disk Cleanup tool to do this.

2. If the disk is more than about 70% full copy the data that you very rarely use to an external hard disk and delete it from the internal disk.

3. Defragment the hard drive. You can use the Windows defragmenter to do that.

Your problem is equally likely to be a poor wifi connection, outdated network drivers, or even insufficient bandwidth.

 

[Devlin]

4GB of RAM is enough for today. Engaged in the development of applications for mobile devices and I 8GB is not enough. Recently appealed for help to the professionals at [Link removed] They advised me to move to 16 GB.

 

[Big_Rich]

4GB of RAM is enough for today.

No it isn't.