My first PC in 2001 had 300 MB (!) of RAM with the new XP. Then I moved to a laptop with 500 MB of RAM still XP in 2005 and finally upgrading to 1GB of RAM which made the laptop fairly snappy. In 2007 I bought a laptop with 2 GB of RAM running Vista, unfortunately RAM was not upgradable but enough with Vista 32bit. In 2013 I bought my current laptop with 8GB of RAM which I find plenty even using heavy weight programs such as Photoshop. It’s almost due time to buy a new machine, and I’m on the fence about getting again 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM. 300MB to 8 GB, a big increase indeed! What is the new standard?
This PC came with 16 GB. My laptops came with 4 GB and they have both been upgraded to 8GB. The SSDs made more of a difference in performance though. I think 8GB would be the minimum you would want from a new machine.
For PC or laptop? From what I have read around various places--16 GB of the fastest RAM one can afford. DDR4 form factor is typical. DDR5 is out now for 600-level boards but it's so expensive--600-800 USD for 16 GB. I have 32 GB of DDR4 RAM (2x16) at 3200mHz running in dual channel but I have to enable the xmp profile for that in the BIOS. Otherwise it runs at 2333mHz and I can def. tell the difference. I consider this the "rock bottom" of my hardware configuration--that is, I intend to upgrade the memory modules when I next upgrade my PC's cpu and motherboard. Def. not going back to anything lower.
Thanks for the fast replies. SSD is standard nowadays, I can't imagine buying a machine with the old mechanical hard drive. My curiosity is about the level of performance between 8 and16 GB, 32GB is still too expensive especially for laptops (I would never buy a desktop). @plat1098 32 GB is your "rock bottom", any particular reasons for having so much RAM?
I can't recall how much RAM my first PC had but not much lol. Both my desktop at home and laptop at work each have 32GB of RAM.
Desktop - 16GB I rarely run many programs simultaneously so find this enough, I even allocate half of that to a dynamically sized ramdisk. When buying, at the time (5 years ago now !) I just thought get as much as I could sensibly afford.
On my desktop I have 32 GB of RAM. I bought it with 16 GB installed and decided to buy another 16. It's usually easier to find and buy it when new computer is bought then trying to do it few years latter.
10 year old desktop with 12GB of ram, still running smooth as a babies butt. 2 year old desktop with 8 GB of ram which I rarely use as I hate laptops.
My 6 year-old Dell laptop has 12gb. My 14 year-old Dell desktop has 12gb also. I dual boot Win10 and Linux Mint on both. Both run fairly smooth still, although it’s going to be time to buy new before too long.
My first PC had 128 MB of RAM. I added 256 MB later, so in total it was 384MB. Currently my personal laptop has 6GB of RAM. I would like to have 2 GB more, but it is old laptop that has all 2 RAM slots occupied and I don't want to invest in it much, so it will stay that way. Lean, minimalistic Debian setup with 6GB works quite well anyway. My work laptop has 16GB. New model will have 32GB I believe.
On my main PC, 16gb. It’s more than what I need for gaming and daily use. That is why i'm using PrimoCache (4GB reserved) to speed up r/w operations and it works very well.
I have 16GB of RAM in the main laptop I use, becuase I often have tens of browser tabs open. If not for having so many tabs open, then 8GB would be more than enough for my usage and that is enough for most users. It's actually very easy to tell if your computer has enough RAM, or if you need more. If you open Task Manager and it shows memory usage of more than 74%, it indicates that your computer is running low on RAM. If your RAM usage is reguarly over 74%, adding more RAM, or perhaps having fewer apps and browser tabs open - if that is an option, will help improve performance. My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A which had 16kB of RAM. To put that in to perspective, my current computer has a million times more RAM! Technically the computer only had 256 bytes of RAM, but it could store software in its 16kB of video RAM. If we are to look at 256 bytes vs 16GB, 16GB is 62 and a half million times more.
@roger_m Very cool, my first computer was 8bit Canon V-20 MSX My original Canon V20 MSX broke up, but i bought one mint condition Canon MSX several years ago. It wasn't cheap, but for nostalgic reasons i had to buy it.
@moredhelfinland One day I may buy a MSX computer. I never owned one, but I have fond memories of using them in a department store back in the day.
Rog, Oh yeah, and those times how to get the games to work on an PC when they needed A LOT of free base to even start. Somethin like 636kb or even more. Some games like Ultima 7 was one of them. I went to local library, lend a book about PC programming. Especially i was interested about memory areas between 640-1024. Oh well, i found several memory areas reserved to Hercules graphics etc i dont remember anymore lol. So in config.sys, was it emm386 or himem.sys and those are memory managers you can exclude those memory areas and then load for example cd rom drivers(via autoexec.bat using LH(loadhigh) to that area to increase basic memory.... After "studying" and testing, i managed to get all drivers to "upper memory" thus leaving a lot base free memory to get some games to run. Then i used QEMM(third party memory manager) and it managed to get free memory, but many games did not work with it. Those were the times, especially when i was 12 years old lol.
I guess it comes from two sources: Sometimes (not often) I do a lot of simultaneous tasks and memory use goes up considerably. I always want that buffer. I still have my pagefile anyway. Also, this is a long while ago but I started off with a cheap PC with only 4 GB of RAM and it kept very nearly using it all up (Windows 10 plus a memory leak in Firefox). Never again. By rock-bottom, I meant 3200mHz. Faster clocks--maybe 3600 or 3800mHz..
It's interesting, most people have 16 GB and aim to get 32 GB in the future... It seems obvious that 16 GB is the new standard, and I will certainly go for that when buying my next machine. Photoshop (and lightroom as well) can easily jack memory usage up to 7 Gb in post processing heavy photo raw files, but it has really never exceeded the maximum RAM so far. thanks a lot for the info.
My first PC had i think 128mb, or 256 I can't remember. My current desktop has 32gb and my laptop has 16gb.
I currently have 16 gigs, but I'm thinking about upgrading to 32 gigs so I can run Windows 11 in a virtual machine. Trying to run a VM in 16 gigs is a bit of a squeeze.
My first PC was 300MHz, 32MB and 8MB GPU. Now it is 3GHz, 32GB and 8GB GPU. Pretty much the same, just a few more zeros.
My first laptop had 2GB then a newer laptop which I used for 8 years had 4GB. Now I am using a newly built desktop pc which has 8GB. The motherboard and cpu both support upto 128GB in this pc. I plan to upgrade to 32 GB.
My first pc, had 64 KB of Ram total, that were fully exploitable only using assembly language, otherwise with Basic you could use much less Ram. I wrote 2 assembly programs that I sent to Commodore, one solved the problem of the frequency of the electric current in USA 60 Hz while in Europe 50 Hz that made the clocks malfunction. The other software was a booster to greatly reduce the loading of software from tape drives. I also created softwares to visualize the time dilation at the approximation of the speed of light, or for large prime numbers. The relative difficulty was the considerable time to visualize these results, which I solved thanks to logarithmic scales. The Commodore softhouse rewarded me with a sum of money and a job offer that I did not accept because I had to move to the USA. Who knows maybe now my life would have been different, instead of being just a poor humble fisherman who loves nature and nothing more ........ I was 19 years old.
