Upgrading RAM to improve performance?
Ultimately this comes down to what you are trying to use your Laptop for.
You have mentioned that you are working with virtual machines, so we'll use that as a starting point. You currently have 6GB RAM.
What will upgrading my RAM allow you to do?
- Allocate more memory to current VM's, requiring less writes to HDD
- Create more VM's, as there is more memory to allocate
- Allow the host (Your Laptop's OS) to keep more memory free, again requiring less writes to HDD
So, why is writing to HDD bad?
In short, it's not ... It's just slower (Debatable, but not with a laptop)
So what happens if you're still experiencing slow performance after the upgrade?
This will most likely be caused by your processor. You currently have an Intel Dual core processor, which with hyper-threading creates 4 virtual cores.
This means that you would realistically only be able to run 3 virtual machines simultaneously with relative ease.
On a last note, and possibly the most overlooked performance issue with laptops, is air flow. To put this into perspective, I can't play 'Heros of the storm' without performance lag. Once I put it on a laptop cooling base, it runs perfectly.
1For bread and butter applications you will probably see only very little performance improvement. For virtual it is very useful. However, here you are also limited by the number of CPU threads which I think are 4 in your i5. – whs – 2015-05-03T02:57:08.100
You would notice an increase in speed by installing an SSD if you don't already have one. – Richie086 – 2016-09-06T16:38:15.477
Adding more memory will not make your system run faster. The amount of system memory, your system has, will have no effect on the speed of the system. How fast your system is is handled by the CPU. – Ramhound – 2016-09-06T17:55:24.550