Hi there,
Hopefully this question falls under the guidelines here, even though I'm not looking for support (per se) for a machine I own ... yet.
I'm looking at buying a Gazelle Professional.
SHORT VERSION of this question: Is 8 GB of RAM enough for a computer I'll still be using in 5, maybe even 10 years?
Now for more detail:
I'm one of those people that buys a new computer once every five to ten years. My current one -- on its last legs -- is ten years old. With finances looking better now than they did ten years ago I will hopefully budget to buy something new more often, but my habit has been to keep a computer going until I just can't stand how slow it has become -- because software requirements have finally overtaken its specs, not because I need to defrag or clean out my pet viruses.
So it occurs to me that I should buy something with way more RAM than is necessary initially, so that in five or ten years I won't be tearing my hair out.
But how much RAM is overkill?
First, I don't use my laptop for gaming or for high end graphics work. I do *some* graphics work, but it's primarily low resolution Web graphics when I'm fixing up a website. (I don't generally create new websites unless they're my own projects, and even then they're usually light on graphics as that's not my forte.) I find my current ten-year-old machine slows to a crawl if I open more than about a dozen tabs in Firefox. But the fact is, when I'm neck deep in researching something, I could easily open 50 tabs and have another 50 open on news websites, and then god help me if I need to open a spreadsheet. It's painful, especially as it's a work computer and I can't sit around all day while my hard drive thrashes away.
I'm sure 4 GB of RAM would beat the 1.5 I have now hands down. I would easily spring for 8 GB. But this (and other upgrades from the base model) all starts to add up, and so I ask myself, "Is 16 GB overkill? Will I thank the gods for my foresight in ten years for buying 16 gig of RAM now, or will it ultimately be a waste for me?"
I know I can theoretically buy and add more RAM later, but I did that with my current machine and, quite frankly, I'm not fully convinced that worked, as I should have seen a huge increase in performance from the 512 MB I started with, but I didn't. Plus, there's no guarantee there will be the right RAM readily available in a decade.
Do any of you have any thoughts on this?
Thanks very much in advance.
Craig
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