Laptop - worth increasing RAM?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Acer ES1-521 with 8Gb RAM, AMD A6-6310 CPU, Radeon R4 Graphics1Tb HDD. It seems to have one memory slot occupied, one empty. Running Win10

64bit.

[John Rumm]

For most "office" style applications at the moment, 8GB ought to be adequate. You may want more if doing lots of photoshop etc. You can check by opening task manager when you have open a "typical" set of applications, and clicking on the Performance tab, and then the "Memory" entry on the left. Look at the "Committed" amount at the bottom of the window. If that is less than the physical ram, then there will be no particular gain in having more.

(The big performance gain would come from swapping the HDD for a SSD - that can make even fairly basic laptops "feel" very much more responsive).

[alan_m]

For around £35 I would insert another 8G of RAM

I've performed this exercise on two laptops last year and for SOME applications there has been a noticeable increase of speed.

I would take the type number off the existing RAM to make sure that you are matching the modules in both slots.

There is often a Youtube video showing how to insert RAM or how to get the back cover in order to gain access to the RAM slots.

On a friends ACER (different to the OPs model) that I added RAM to it was a tiny bit of a PITA because the RAM slots were on the keyboard side of the main board requiring a few ribbon cable connections to be unplugged and the screws holding down the main board to be removed in order to lift off the main board.

I've just checked and the ES1-521 is similar Instructions here

If you have no experience of dismantling Laptops watch a few more Youtube videos showing connector dismantling and/or repairing. If you haven't seen some of these connectors before the various methods of connection may not be that obvious - but extremely easy once you do know. Its also worth a close-up photo with a mobile phone or equivalent of what you are dismantling so you can see where things were meant to go on re-assembly.

[alan_m]

Possibly a better video showing ribbon connector dismantling. Often the black bit is gently moved forward by a mm and the ribbon pulls out. On some connector the black bit hinges up.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

John Rumm brought next idea :

That shows 4.1 committed of 8.8 Gb - I don't know where the extra .8Gb came from, but it seems not worthwhile adding more. Thanks..

[Rambo]

Yes...installing another similar spec SODIMM will enable dual channel mode. You can never have enough RAM.

[Rambo]

That's because Dual Channel 64bit mode comes into play. I've never understood why manufacturers only use one stick, when 2 modules is always better( ie 2 x 4G will outperform 1 X 8G.) Saves them a few pennies I suppose!

[Fred]

Yes. well worth increasing it if you arent just using it for usenet and browsing.

[Fredxx]

Just checked and I do believe this laptop may well utilise dual channel mode with 2 modules fitted.

Still agree with John about SSDs. They make boot time shrink. They are more rugged and take less power (I think). Though always back them up as they tend to fail catastrophically without notice.

[Rambo]

Yes SSD is the way to go, however they can be expensive for a larger capacity. Some older laptops, thinkpads in particular have a Msata socket and an Msata SSD is pretty cheap 128GB is less than £30. Granted it's usally only sata 2 but its a very cheap upgrade to install a msata for Windows and keep your old HDD for storage. Also if you have a cd/dvd the adapters are very cheap to fit an additional small SSD drive in that bay and keep your existing HDD for storage. It's a very cost effective way of upgrading an older laptop.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not really worth it unless you are a 'power user'

this desktop here is heavily used and I never run out of 8GB RAM TBH 4GB is enough for most things.

[Paul]

Uh,oh!

Memory channels: 1 <=== Channel width (bits): 64 Supported memory: DDR3L-1866 DIMMs per channel: 2 <===

It's not dual channel, according to that. This means there is no bandwidth increase from stuffing the second slot.

All that stuffing the second slot does, is increase the overall amount of RAM. For which you have to decide, whether you were "short" of RAM previously.

The above issue is also a danger with dual channel CPUs. The designer of the motherboard reserves the right to only wire up one of the two channels, and put two DIMMs on that single channel. Doing so, reduces power consumption on the memory controller, by two or three watts, improving battery life. Part of that, is things like terminator power for the bus (the bus design varies from one generation to the next, so I will refrain from predictions on this).

But the above information suggests that, unless you really really need to double the RAM, it's just not worth it. For example, some people like to keep 200 tabs open on their browser (for work say), and those are the people who will tell you how wonderful all the extra RAM was. Well, their processor is now slow as molasses, lugging all that junk around. As long as the web pages are not allowed to update themselves, the CPU loading will be less.

Paul

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Try an ssd first. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

All good points, but I'd still think that the drive might be an issue. Unless its a very fast one an ssd will outperform it. Generally the ram only needs to be more if you are using a lot of things at once and some of them are very data intensive. Brian

[alan_m]

I fitted a SSD to my previous laptop and really didn't notice that much change in boot up time. Yes there was some increase in speed but again only for some activities, noticeably when virus checking the whole system etc. At the time I didn't think the investment worth it for the performance increase. The performance of the hard disk on my previous machine may not have been the bottle neck or the factor limiting the speed.

Many years on, prices now for SSD are different so if the usage of the laptop doesn't require massive amounts of hard disk space then SSD may be worth investigating to increase speed. What would you do with the speed increase that you are not doing now.

I'm probably in the market for a new machine (laptop) sometime this year and I will seriously consider one with SSD rather than one with spinning rust. I believe that one thing to watch with current machines is that the SSD also has a form factor much like RAM modules that slot into connectors BUT some manufactures are now soldering the chips directly on to the main board so no easy DIY upgrade path is possible if a larger SSD is required.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Brian Gaff (Sofa) used his keyboard to write :

I have decided to leave it as is - an SSD of comparable size to my HDD would make it a very expensive upgrade for what is now a battered old machine. John's diagnostic method suggests I have more memory than I need.

It's by no means slow, but a boost in response would not go amiss.

Fixing one issue a while ago, I caused another one - I managed to damage the one of the USB + microSD card connections to the m/board. I managed to pick up a good, cheap used one a couple of weeks ago, all now working - in the process I noticed a spare ram slot, which got me wondering if it might be worth while my doubling the ram, as cheap upgrade.

[The Natural Philosopher]

from 3 minutes boot to 28 seconds is worth having, also loading programs is sub second

SSDs do NOT fail catastrophically. Quite the reverse, They keep going with substantial and detectable errors.

you need to use S.M.A.R/T to interrogate them.

They are still about three times the price of spinning rust, but its getting closer. They are faster last *longer* and are more shock resistant.

There is usually expansion available

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Since I never needed the TB of disk mine came with I removed it and put in a 120GB SSD drive.

faster on booting. Obviously programs that dont use the disk run at the same speed they always did....

Getting more speed out of a computer is a case of diminishing returns. Most code now on a single user computer fits comfortably in 8GB RAM with no swapping. SSD improves boot time, but not running speed, and even upping cache and cores in the CPU doesn't speed most stuff up that much.

[John Rumm]

IME the amount of difference you get depends on a number of variables.

Laptops with really slow CPUs don't benefit as much since the bottleneck simple moves to the CPU[1].

For medium spec and up however there is more scope for improvement. On i3 or i5 based machines (or comparable AMD platforms) the change can be dramatic.

The way you use it also matters. If you boot, then load and use one program at a time, you will see less benefit since you are not relying on that much disk access anyway. If however you have a bunch of apps open at any one time and swap back and fourth between them you will get more impact from a slow disc.

Years on, the speed of SSDs has also improved. Most reasonable SSDs from known brands will run as fast at the 6Gb/s SATA interface can go - so typically top out about 560 MB/sec.

More modern laptops often now have M2 drives, and some of those support a NVMe interface. That removes the bottleneck of the SATA connection, so read speeds of > 2500MB/sec are not uncommon.

There is very little reason to go for a standard HDD these days. For mobile use SSD wins on every count except cost per GB, and even that is not as dramatic as once was. So unless you really must have 2TB of storage on the laptop, go SSD.

(IME for most users, 250GB is usually plenty)

Yup that's the M2 drive format. Note that M2 sockets are not all the same - some only do a version of SATA, while some have the faster option of NVMe.

Apple being one of the main culprits on that!

[1] Also worth noting that windows versions before Win 7 don't support a feature of SSDs called "trim" - so performance slowly degrades with time. Another problem on systems built with Win XP can be the partitioning software did not always align the start of partitions on page boundaries, and that also hurts SSD performance.

[John Rumm]

That's not really true... you could argue you can never have too much ram. But there is clearly a point where you have "enough". Once you have reached that, adding more will not in itself improve performance further (with the caveat that two devices may perform slightly better than one even if the total amount of RAM is the same).