Laptop Memory

[BetBuddy]

Hi,

I know about the positives but are there any negatives (apart from cost) to upgrading a laptop's memory from 8GB to 32GB ?

Its a Windows 10 Intel i5 8th Gen machine.

Could be wrong but i think i read somewhere that Apple doesn't advise upgrading their laptops greater than 16GB.

Cheers,

[Big Bad Barney]

I'm no expert, but I don't see how more ram or too much ram can cause problems. My understanding is that if you don't fill the ram. It just sits there and does nothing.

There are advantages to having two sticks as oppossed to one stick. Something to do with the dual channels going the cpu or some jazz...those threadripper cpu's have 4 channels, so four sticks is best......something like that anyway...

There are people out there who know more than me

[Wolf1877]

Providing the hardware / motherboard can cope with the RAM you are planning to upgrade then there are no negatives to more RAM. Ideally you need matching RAM memory boards of identical spec from the same manufacturer and even then you can get problems especially on the latest high performance RAM. I upgraded RAM on a couple of brand new PCs last year - 1 worked fine and 1 didnt even though I bought matching memory (same spec same manufacturer) so I ended up buying a new matching pair of boards and it worked fine.

Basically if your PC has insufficient RAM to run all of your processes it temporarily "pages out" (saves) the least urgently needed RAM out of memory onto your hard disk to free up some RAM for the other processes. Then later when the original RAM is needed again the PC "pages in" (reads) the disk copy of the RAM back into memory. It follows therefore that adding RAM will reduce paging occuring and give a performance improvement on any machine that has insufficient RAM installed to meet peak demand. You can use resource monitor to see how much RAM you are typically using at any point in time

Just to add that johnsheppard is correct in that using all of the 2 or 4 available RAM slots can also gives a performance improvement. Its like a 4 lane highway can handle a greater throughput of traffic than a one lane highway even if the individual cars are all travelling at 70mph.