What do you mean with old fashioned, I suppose it's Intel based? But I've read that Apple is planning to launch a 15 inch MacBook Air so I'm all ears. But it's mostly the price that stops me from buying a Mac, at least so far. Windows is still pretty good, but it's starting to get more annoying.
I was being ironic. My MBA is fairly new and has an M1 chip. It's just that as soon as you get anything Apple out of its box it's usually outdated. I thought it was a bargain for what I paid for it. I only wish they still made the smaller MacBooks. I only paid slightly less for my bespoke Juno laptop running Ubuntu. Windows isn't still pretty good. Windows is annoying, in fact it's a pane lol.
OK I see, the M1 is of course still superior to Intel and AMD CPU's depending on what tasks you are performing. The stuff that annoys me about Windows is that they refuse to improve Windows Explorer, and the DPI scaling issues with especially older apps is quite shocking. And in Win 11 they are now trying to take away customization options. But other than that, it does get the job done at a way cheaper price than Apple.
My MBA was a reasonable price compared to a laptop of the same ability running Windows. The stuff that annoys me about Windows is that it's Windows. Although I am writing this on a custom built laptop running Ubuntu lol.
My XP Pro rig that I currently use I had upped to 8GB RAM. My Win 7 PC waiting to replace it has 16GB RAM. I always go for the maximum amount I can get, and laugh at them that whine about "wasted RAM"! Like it's soooo rare or expensive. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it!
My current best laptop has 16gb RAM & a 512gb SSD. Even so, I still miss my first computer (an Atari 800) at times because the keys clicked when pressed & the external floppy drive went chee-chee-chee whenever it loaded & saved stuff. That Atari had a whopping 8kb of Ram, upgradable to 48kb. It included Atari Basic programming language. The Basic included a pseudo-random number generator. I wrote several text-based RPGs & card games on that sweet thing, for my personal use.
My new machine uses 6 GB (out of 16 max) when idle! And 7 GB with Edge and one tab (Windows 11). My old machine uses 2.7 GB (out of 8 max) when idle (Windows 10). Seems to me 6 GB is a lot for doing nothing, can anyone check their memory usage with Windows 11? I’ll have to check how much is used with Photoshop, and also try Chrome to compare. Worst scenario I will have to upgrade memory to 32GB…
Is Task Manager showing that any apps are using excessive amounts of RAM? Also one thing to consider, is that as long as RAM usage doesn't exceed 74%, it doesn't matter how much is being used.
I checked and there are many programs running, but none of them seems to use a lot. The RAM usage varies between 5 (idle) and 7 GB browsing with Edge and a few tabs open. Opening Photoshop, RAM goes up to 10 GB for normal Photoshop operations and gets to 14 GB for the most intensive operations which don’t last very long. It doesn’t seem to exceed the maximum RAM (16GB), although in hindsight I should have gone for 32 GB RAM rather than 16. The CPU is very powerful, the fans haven’t kick in so far even for the most demanding tasks. I’m considering uninstalling all the Dell programs, perhaps it might save some RAM…
I'm using 10 GB out of 32 just sitting here with Firefox open, single tab. The more you have the more your system will use. Is your PC slow in a way you can trace back to a lack of RAM? 16 should still be fine. I only went 32 because the laptop I bought is not upgradeable. If you start uninstalling things and disabling services and such you might find a slight decrease in RAM usage but I doubt you will notice a difference beyond the placebo effect. As for Photoshop it's a pig regardless and is still slow with 32 GB so that's a problem you won't solve with any amount. Most software is just poorly programmed these days. If anything I regret spending what I spent on a laptop with an i9 and 32 GB because it really doesn't seem much faster than an i7 and 16 GB would have been.
You could be right. I’ve noticed that my old machine with 8GB RAM, would use almost all the RAM in Photoshop without ever exceeding the maximum, namely in this case about 7.5 GB for demanding tasks. The new machine with 16 GB RAM, behaves similarly by using 14.5 GB for demanding tasks. Therefore it is a possibility that Windows might assign as much available RAM as possible to Photoshop to speed things up, and it is definitely faster. Would that be the same say with 32 or 64 GB? Is speed in a computer related to how much the OS is caching?
Yeah, to some limited degree. The more OS caches in RAM, the more instant should be computer response, because RAM is faster than SSD. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Personally I don't know much about Windows memory management or tools to differentiate between memory used as cache vs memory utilized by processes. I am more of a Linux person, but basic ideas are the same. On the other hand lots of memory used by processes (that is not a cache) might be a sign of memory leaks or just poor resource management by those. I don't think that valid conclusion can be drawn withou differentiating between cache vs non-cache usage. To complicate things further some big programs like Firefox do their own internal memory management that may be not differentiateable by OS-level tools thus I suggest excluding browsers from analysis.
They are programs which come pre-installed with a new Dell computer. Actually all brand names have their own selection of programs installed in a new computer. Some are useful at best others are just useless or promoting something. These are the programs that came with my new machine: Dell Pair, Dell Power Manager Service, Dell SupportAssist, Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin for Dell Update, Dell SupportAssist Remediation, Dell Update for Windows 10, Fusion service. I'm still trying to find out whether they are useful or not.
DOS? Windows 95 needed at least 8 MB. Which seems ridiculous by today's standards of thousands of times that.
I would suggest keeping them. SupportAssist in particular is a very useful app, as it checks for driver, BIOS and firmware updates. It also does some other things such as running diagnostics and removing junk files. Dell Pair is something you hay have no use for. But it won't cause any problems leaving it installed. https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-au/000201693/what-is-dell-pair Whenever I do a clean install of Windows on a Dell computer, after installing every available Windows Update, I install both SupportAssist and Command Update. Command Update, is Dell's other tool to check for updates. On supported computers, Command Update has a feature called Advanced Driver Restore. It installs all the standard Dell drivers for that computer. In doing so, it installs drivers for any devices that don't have drivers installed and replaces generic Microsoft drivers with the correct OEM ones. I like Dell's apps, as they are free of adverts, which as you noted is often not the case.
Thanks Roger, I have also reached the conclusion that most of Dell’s programs supplied with the computer are useful. I would rather have Dell to take care of drivers than Windows update. My old machine, a 10 years old Samsung i7 is beautifully built, still looking as if it was brand new, but it was a real pain through the years in terms of drivers updates, Samsung had given up years ago keeping track of MS updates, and as a result I lost control of so many keys which had important functions assigned to them (display brightness, muting, back-lit keys, and others. The basic generic functionality was supplied by Windows Update, but it was always not quite right.
That won't be a driver issue. There will be some software from Samsung that is needed for that. If you go the the support page for your laptop, you should find the required app there. Since most likely it will be a very old version, you may want to Google the apps name, to see if you can find a more recent version.
The Samsung support page was ineffective as far back as 2014 (my laptop was top of the line in 2013 when I bought it). As I said hardware and materials are first quality but software I would recommend to stay away from it, most of their dedicated software downloads with errors and problems. In 2015 Samsung had the insane audacity to advice their users not to update Windows anymore... Well, that was my experience, I don't know nowadays, but we all know the saying 'once bitten, twice shy', I will never ever buy a Samsung computer in the future again.
This may be of help. https://www.samsung.com/us/support/troubleshooting/TSG01109626/ If not, can you post the model of your laptop and I will see if I can find a solution.
