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What would you use more ram for? Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill. And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) th

What would you use more ram for? Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill. And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place?

YourMatt 6y ago
I'm a fullstack dev, and I routinely fill up the 16GB in my laptop. I generally have two full IDEs, SSMS, Illustrator, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, Visio, a bunch of browser tabs, and now Teams or Zoom. I tend to be more constrained by core count than RAM though. I try to use my desktop as much as possible (which has 64GB and 16 cores), but I can't always be tethered to my office.
jlokier 6y ago
> Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill. I'm not doing heavy processing at the moment, and 8 seems too small for my light reading. I have a 16 GiB MacBook and at the moment the built-in Activity Monitor say it's using ~14.5 GiB. Firefox shows as ~9 GiB, and Safari as ~4 GiB. I also have a VM running Linux, most of my work (other than reading and editing files) runs inside it. It's currently showing as using less than the browsers, about ~4 GiB. There are some other tools running, such as terminals and Emacs. But they take much less. None of this is heavy processing. Those figures don't add up to < 16 GiB. There is obviously some sharing taking place and/or compression, or other misleading aspect to the figures. So is it using a lot of RAM really? Yes: recently I noticed serious slowdowns while reading. It's because the system was swapping to SSD under high memory pressure when I had Word, LibreOffice, Preview (for PDFs) open as well, and after some video conferencing tool was still active but not doing anything. It was not a busy CPU, it was memory pressure. So my next laptop might need more than 16 GiB. > And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place? Because it's your main and only decent computer, and you need it to be portable sometimes. Admittedly all this working from home is changing the equation temporarily. But even at home, I don't want to sit in the same place all day every day. Back before Covid, I didn't work at a fixed location so needed to take my work with me. In future, I hope to do that again, so getting another laptop when I'm ready seems like the smart choice again.
fomine3 6y ago
8GB RAM is minimum for Win10 basic computer. It works for some use cases but I need more future-proof spec for such expensive device.

YourMatt 6y ago

I'm a fullstack dev, and I routinely fill up the 16GB in my laptop. I generally have two full IDEs, SSMS, Illustrator, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, Visio, a bunch of browser tabs, and now Teams or Zoom. I tend to be more constrained by core count than RAM though. I try to use my desktop as much as possible (which has 64GB and 16 cores), but I can't always be tethered to my office.

jlokier 6y ago

> Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill. I'm not doing heavy processing at the moment, and 8 seems too small for my light reading. I have a 16 GiB MacBook and at the moment the built-in Activity Monitor say it's using ~14.5 GiB. Firefox shows as ~9 GiB, and Safari as ~4 GiB. I also have a VM running Linux, most of my work (other than reading and editing files) runs inside it. It's currently showing as using less than the browsers, about ~4 GiB. There are some other tools running, such as terminals and Emacs. But they take much less. None of this is heavy processing. Those figures don't add up to < 16 GiB. There is obviously some sharing taking place and/or compression, or other misleading aspect to the figures. So is it using a lot of RAM really? Yes: recently I noticed serious slowdowns while reading. It's because the system was swapping to SSD under high memory pressure when I had Word, LibreOffice, Preview (for PDFs) open as well, and after some video conferencing tool was still active but not doing anything. It was not a busy CPU, it was memory pressure. So my next laptop might need more than 16 GiB. > And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place? Because it's your main and only decent computer, and you need it to be portable sometimes. Admittedly all this working from home is changing the equation temporarily. But even at home, I don't want to sit in the same place all day every day. Back before Covid, I didn't work at a fixed location so needed to take my work with me. In future, I hope to do that again, so getting another laptop when I'm ready seems like the smart choice again.

fomine3 6y ago

8GB RAM is minimum for Win10 basic computer. It works for some use cases but I need more future-proof spec for such expensive device.