More RAM to old laptop?

[RacerBG]

I have Acer Aspire 5738Z from 2009. Yes, this was not the best time to buy Intel based laptop. In 2010 arrived  laptops with Intel HD video card but this is another story...

5738Z have:

3 GB RAM
2.2 GHz 2 cores CPU
Intel GMA 4500M
320 GB HDD

I remember that when I was reading the manual Acer stated that they offered RAM upgrades up to 16 GB if I remember right. This laptop is already with damaged battery and its video card looks like its giving up already. But anyway what you think? Does adding more RAM will have any positive effect (I mean bigger) to my experience? Intel GMA is not the best card you know but buying a new laptop just for Intel HD is a waste of money. ;D

[pavroo]

Honestly? I don't think so.
My laptop has 1.5 GB of RAM and sparky's lxde desktop takes about 700mb including a few applications such as icewaesel, icedove, rrsowl, bittorrent client, etc.
3 GB is enough for me, changing it for 16 gb is fine if you set your computer into a host for a few virtual machines working in the same time on it.

[wayne]

Well, just my opinion.

3G Ram for laptop is a lot ( relative term, I knew people using 16G to 32G RAM for modern laptop).

Unless you are running RAM intensive programs, video editing, photo editing etc, you should be doing well in Linux with just 2G RAM. Anyway using laptop for those tasks is also not too good due to much lower resolution of display compared with desktop with a very large LCD display with high resolution.

If I open two browsers firefox / palemoon, and each 20-30 tabs, running a youtube video, do some browsing, download some files via internet, the RAM used is still less than around 800M to 1.1G

Even running Win7 would take just 1.2-1.8G Ram for such a loading..

If I were in this situation I would not add any more RAM.

[RacerBG]

Thanks for the tips, guys. :) Looks like I will use that baby for a few more years! ;D

[Ashry]

Yes I think Same. 3GB Ram is lot for Laptop. You did mention that you bought it in 2009. You can better get new one if you not satisfied with the performance with it in any used Laptop buy sell online store.

[xendistar]

A laptop in 2009 would not been able to handle more than 4gb of memory which is a restriction to the 32bit based operating system. So unless Acer was using some very expensive memory management system it is very unlikely that the laptop would have been offered with 16gb of memory

[MoroS]

A laptop in 2009 would not been able to handle more than 4gb of memory which is a restriction to the 32bit based operating system. So unless Acer was using some very expensive memory management system it is very unlikely that the laptop would have been offered with 16gb of memory

Why not? This little rig has a Pentium Dual Core T4200 (some variations had a Core2 Duo) on it, which is a x86_64 capable CPU. As for the specs, this model seems to handle a maximum of 8GB of RAM.

The 64-bit architecture is here for far longer than most people remember (12 years or more). The first laptop (at least that I found) with x64 support is dated back to 2003: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/amd-athlon64-m/index.html