[Closed] Max RAM possible?

you can up paging memory on the hard disk but it'll slow everything down with extra disk activity.

HP are so wrong. I mean why should they know better than a forum full of random blokes about the hardware specs of your laptop? Do they think they designed and built it or something?

you coudl always upgrade to Windows 7 (or down to XP) - it'll speed things up more than another Gb of ram....

Don't want to upgrade to W7 yet and I'm bored of XP. TBH Vista works just fine for me - runs everything as quickly if not quicker than on XP anyway.

4GB will be a hardware limit of the motherboard. Not much you can do about that.
Though I find that 4GB is typically enough at the moment on my desktop (for running big image editors like Photoshop, CaptureNX etc).

Only other boost might be to fit a solid state drive as mentioned in the post the other day.

you coudl always upgrade to Windows 7 (or down to XP) - it'll speed things up more than another Gb of ram....

+1

when Vista got this bad rep.

Agreed. Loads of people had issues with stability, sw compatibility, etc. We're now 3yrs+ further on and things are a lot better.

+1 running Vista64 at home and it isn't slow at all. (Got Win7 sitting on the shelf but haven't installed it yet).

You can use ReadyBoost in Vista to use any USB flash memory as RAM
[url= http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2017818,00.asp ] well thats the theory never used Vista myself but worth a Google.

There is nothing really wrong with Vista, however I personally find it to be differcult at times and it is well documented that it is a bit hungry on system resources (Memory). 4GB of memory should be plenty for a laptop, I would recommend looking at the task manager and see what is using all of your RAM. I would also advise removing all any vendor bloat-ware (HP branded rubbish apps that is likely to be pre installed) generally this is pretty useless and again will eat into your valuable resources. The advice offered above in regards to adding a SSD would indeed give you a better performance in most respects albeit at a bit of a premium. Also I would recommend looking at Win7 I find it to be much more user friendly (Interface) and not so intensive on your hardware, you will not see a massive overall performance difference from Vista though (Just nicer IMO).

What apps are you running? 4Gb is still quite a lot of memory, and most apps won't be RAM-bound I'd imagine, Or if they are, it's because they're I/O bound in which case see the SSD thread.

You appear to still be living in 2006, when Vista got this bad rep. due to people trying to run it on underspecced machines.

Shouldn't a new OS make your old hardware run faster? That would be coding progress right?

Don't you get to the stage where the RAM no longer matters because the MB will only operate at a certain speed?

Do they think they designed and built it or something?

I bet the OP is actually the HP support line, checking up on their best and most reliable source of information.

having just upgraded a relatively new pc (i.e. not much crap on it) to W7 from Vista my experience is that it's faster for the applications that I run.

Don't get me wrong - laptop is running 2gb at present and very fast - more than happy with it for the usual day to day stuff.

What apps are you running? 4Gb is still quite a lot of memory, and most apps won't be RAM-bound I'd imagine, Or if they are, it's because they're I/O bound in which case see the SSD thread.

I need to run several heavy apps at once; Mind Manager 8, all Office 2007 stuff especially PowerPoint with loads of custom images, GIMP, Articulate Studio, and other stuff. Runs almost okay with this lot, and another 2gb will probably do the trick. But if I can get more than that then even better.

Cheers

I would change to Windows 7. You would not believe the speed difference apparently. What the hell is Vista!? 😆