Will I perceive speed improvement with more RAM?

Question

I have a Toshiba Satellite L855-S5240.

The current specs are:

Intel® Core™ i5-2450M Processor2.5 GHz, (3.1 GHz with Turbo Boost Technology 2.0), 3MB L3 Cache

Mobile Intel® HM76 Express Chipset

Mobile Intel®HD graphics with shared graphics memory

Configured with 6GB DDR3 1333MHz (max 16GB) 2 main memory slots. Both memory slots occupied

I have ordered a 8GB stick and intend to replace the current 2GB stick.. bringing me to 12GB total.

This is the stick: Amazon Link

Will I notice a benefit? Particularly working with virtual machines and overall system performance?

Answer 1

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?

1. Allocate more memory to current VM's, requiring less writes to HDD
2. Create more VM's, as there is more memory to allocate
3. 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.

Answer 2

check the RAM usage when you do your normal work. Is your RAM nearly full and Windows pages memory out into the pagefile? If you can answer this with yes, you will benefit from upgrading the RAM. If you can never fill the RAM, you don't have any benefit and should look for a SSD to improve the boot and app start performance.

Answer 3

12GB of RAM is better than 6. However, will you see an improvement? That depends entirely on your usage. Were you experiencing memory related slowness before? If not, then more than likely you will not see much of an improvement. However, if you were running out of memory and your disk was constantly spinning from swapping, you should see an improvement.