Question: Want a faster laptop, buy more memory. Is this statement entirely honest?

Read our answer below:

In short, yes. To answer this question more technically however, one should appreciate the three biggest contributors to laptop performance. These are a) the processor, b) the memory and c) the hard drive/storage device. As you can see, the second is laptop memory. The best way to understand this truth is to imagine that all the software you run on your laptop (many of which will be run at the same time, even without you knowing (i.e. various background processes) needs to have room in which to operate.

Each time you start a given application, it needs to load itself into memory and instantiate its instance before it can execute. This takes up space. If a laptop runs out of this valuable space (the physical memory also known as RAM) then things will slow down as it forces the laptop (or more specifically the Operating System) to rely on slower virtual memory. This in turn is usually located on the hard drive (which is considerably slower). Even if virtual memory is simulated on a SSD then it's still considerably slower than real RAM.

For more information about why system memory matters hop over to part 1 of the Laptop Memory Upgrades Guide as this takes you through the A-Z of physical and virtual memory!

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