How Much Memory?

[sms1295]

I’m looking at a new laptop. All the systems I look at have at least 4GB. Some systems have option to have a total of 6, 8, or 12GB. Are there a general rules to how much memory you should have?

Thanks,

 

[Soccerman06]

4 GB is more than enough for general use, even most video games. What are you doing?

 

[dma0991]

I will 2nd to that. 4GB is more than enough for most general use. Unless you're looking at rendering or editing softwares that can consume a lot of memory. But of course this is a laptop which is not ideal to do such heavy work. Get 6GB if you want to but 8GB is already the maximum and most probably unnecessary in a laptop.

 

[Blain]

Unless it's a mobile workstation, stick with 4GB.

 

[smakme7757]

I purchased a nice top of the line business notebook just over a year ago with 4gb of ram and it's still works wonderfully. If i was purchasing now though i'd go for 8gb. I prefer to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to RAM quantities.

 

[GarfieldtheCat]

4Gb for sure unless you have a specific reason for more (multiple VM's running, etc..)

I'd also add that you should make sure you get 64-bit Windows to be able to use all of the 4Gb

 

[Concillian]

Only once have I exceeded 4GB of memory on my machine. My wife scanned an 8x10 picture at 2400dpi. The resulting image was H U G E (19,200 x 24,000... or 460 megapixels.) I opened it in the Gimp to resize it to something more normal sized and it took like half an hour, because it was hitting the disk for virtual memory.

Other than that, for regular use (10+ tab web browsers, Excel, Powerpoint, etc... all open in the background while gaming and such like that) 4GB is plenty right now.

On the other hand memory is cheap right now and people are never going to want to use less of it, so if the price is right, it's not bad to have more.

 

[Emulex]

8gb because its cheap - real cheap right now. one vmware (win7) on my macbook flies with 3gb dedicated (locked) and the rest for osx.

on the same laptop with 3gb - its so dog slow its not funny (page city, fans on high).

 

[TonyB]

Are there a general rules to how much memory you should have?

Thanks,

The general rule is based on how much you can easily afford and how much your motherboard can support.

 

[kmmatney]

I would say that 4GB is enough, unless you are running virtual machines. There really isn't much else that needs large amounts of RAM.

 

[Matt_Stevens]

The only time I have found that 4GB was not quite enough was while editing HD video under CS5 on a system circa 2008. Even then it worked though. Just slow.

Otherwise... 4GB is more than enough.