We're two decades into the 21st century, a time where many of us were expecting to have flying cars or apartments on the moon. Instead, tech companies are still selling floppy disks and brand new PCs with an untenable 8GB of RAM. By all means, grab a 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy disk if you still need one. But, for Woz’s sake, don’t get a PC with less than 16GB of memory, unless you plan to buy more RAM and install it yourself.
We’ve reached the point in computing history where you can’t competently run Windows and browse the Internet with less than 16GB on board. On my desktop PC running Windows 10, it takes just 8 Chrome tabs, Slack and Spotify running to cross the 8GB threshold. My regular use case of four dozen tabs takes me up to around 15GB, without running any games or productivity apps. Even with nothing but background services running, I’m using 5.5GB.
Even playing one game will take you past the 8GB limit many $1,000 gaming PCs have. Senior Editor Sarah Jacobsson Purewal shared a screenshot (see how to take screenshots in Windows) of her task manager where Elden Ring is eating 4.4GB of RAM and Steam is gobbling another 354MB. Once you exceed your computer’s physical RAM, the OS will compensate by swapping data in and out of your paging file, significantly harming performance.
Despite the fact that modern Windows PCs really need 16GB of RAM and the cost of adding more RAM is minimal, major PC vendors continue offering systems with a mere 8GB. And we’re not talking about kids’ Chromebooks or $199 cheapo laptops with Pentium CPUs! High-powered $900 gaming laptops and $1,300 ultrabooks also come with just 8GB. By the way, another 8GB of laptop RAM would cost you $25 on Amazon, so it must cost OEMs, who get to pay wholesale, a fraction of that to get this right.
Imagine that your mouth is watering and you’re dying for a Big Mac dinner. You pull up to the McDonald’s Drive-through and see a sign that says “Big Mac, starting at $5.99.” So you order the burger, but, when you pull it out of the bag, you’re surprised to see that it only has one beef patty, one slice of pickle, no cheese, no Big Mac Sauce and no sesame seeds on the bun. You then find out that a “real” Big Mac with the taste you’d expect costs $9.99. McDonald’s wouldn’t sully its name by offering a sub-par experience that would make Grimace blush. Only PC OEMs would do such a thing.
Dell currently sells a config of its flagship XPS 13 laptop with 8GB for a whopping $1,249, while Lenovo’s entry-level ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 10) is $1,319 with 8GB. These two laptops are meant to compete with the best Ultrabooks on the market, and they do when you buy configurations that come with a decent amount of memory. What’s worse in the case of Ultrabooks like these is that the RAM is soldered to the motherboard so there’s no way to upgrade.
Many gaming laptops (including some of the best gaming laptops under $1,500) and desktops also come with just 8GB of RAM, but the good news there is that you can almost always upgrade the memory on your own, a cost you should build into your budget and plan to do right away. For example, Walmart has an MSI GF63 gaming laptop for $599. For that price, you have to settle for lesser specs like a GTX 1650, 256GB SSD and, yes, 8GB of RAM. But you can open it up and swap the RAM for 2 x 8GB DIMMs, which will make your wallet about $50 lighter, but consider that part of the price. (While you’re in there you should also install a roomier SSD, but that’s the subject of another story.)
We’d rather that companies like MSI just make 16GB the minimum standard and raise price as necessary, but as a consumer, you can make 16GB your minimum. Don’t even consider buying a computer with 8GB of RAM that can’t be upgraded. And, if you do see a great deal on an 8GB system, make sure you can also get the RAM and bring it up to 16GB.
If you already have a PC with 4, 8 or even 16GB of memory, adding more RAM is one of the best sub-$100 upgrades you can make. Just check the service manual for your PC or motherboard or visit Crucial’s Advisor to find out the exact type of RAM you need.
