Windows 11 Laptops

RAM & performance

A laptop’s RAM (or memory) is a temporary storage area where data from the laptop’s hard drive is held ready to be processed by the processor. This data is what your laptop needs to run programs, process files and basically run smoothly. Every program or file you have open on your laptop will consume a portion of RAM. The more RAM installed in the laptop, the more data can be stored in this short term storage area and the faster your laptop will perform, especially if you’re multitasking and working with multiple applications at the same time. If you don't have enough RAM in your laptop to cope with the files and apps you’re working with, you’ll notice everything slowing down dramatically and you’ll end up with performance bottlenecks where everything grinds to a halt.

How much RAM do I need?

Generally speaking therefore, the more RAM you can have in your laptop, the better but it’s definitely possible to go overboard as well. If you’re mainly using your laptop for low resource tasks like office work and a bit of web surfing, 16Gb of RAM is probably overkill. To help you decide just how much RAM you actually need, we’ve looked at a few common usage scenarios.

Mainstream usage

If you’ll mainly be using your laptop for routine office work including word processing, email, presentations or spreadsheets, a laptop with 8Gb of RAM is more than capable of handling these applications. It doesn't really make much of a difference whether you have multiple files open simultaneously across multiple programs. 8Gb of RAM is ample for a handful of large files too but if you envisage needing to work on really big documents, especially in quantity, a laptop with 16Gb of RAM is recommended.

Web surfing & streaming

For web surfing, music streaming or watching videos online, 8Gb of RAM should be more than enough, even if you’re running multiple streams simultaneously. The same holds true for web browsing. You only really need to exceed 8Gb of RAM if you’re a seriously heavy web user or multitasker; we’re talking 30 or more browser tabs open at the same time. Chrome in particular is a big hogger of memory so if you’re running lots of web windows and possibly working in other apps at the same time, you’ll probably see the benefit of a 16Gb RAM laptop.

Gaming

Gamers should refer to the developers recommended hardware requirements for guidance on how much RAM they need for optimised game play. As a general rule of thumb, low-end games like Minecraft don’t call for much RAM and even mid-range titles that might need a dedicated graphics card can run smoothly on 8Gb of RAM. It’s only the latest resource heavy, high-end games like Far Cry 5 or Gears Of War 4 that call for 16Gb of RAM. If you plan on live streaming at the same time, you might be better off upgrading to 32Gb of RAM.

Graphic design

Finally, if you’re a graphic designer, we’d recommend a laptop with 8Gb of RAM as the absolute minimum, especially if you’re a Photoshop user as Adobe is known to hog as much memory as it can grab. We’d recommend a 16Gb RAM laptop if you regularly need to edit multiple photos or image files plus switch to other apps running concurrently as this will reduce the likelihood of system freezes.

Summary

To sum up, a laptop with 8Gb of RAM will be sufficient for many mainstream laptop users and will cope reasonably with many applications, some of the less complex games and a moderate degree of multitasking. If you’re a heavyweight user working on lots of big files simultaneously, a laptop equipped with 16Gb of RAM will deliver smoother performance for the increased workload. If you’re still not sure, you can start with an 8Gb laptop and upgrade to 16Gb of RAM later on if you need to but check the laptop’s specs before you buy to ensure the memory can be upgraded.