Basic laptop advice

[Homer]

Ok. I'm after a new laptop for basic use and have a limited budget. I'm not very techie, so help me out with a question re RAM and processors. A couple of HPs have piqued my interest:

HP pavillion 15ab269sa: 8gb ram; intel i3-5157U dual core. £350

HP 15af153sa: 4gb ram; AMD A6 6310 quad core. £280

I'll be using it for general surfing, word processing, YouTube, occasional Photoshopping (generally don't multitask when on Photoshop), etc. I don't game or download/stream HD movies or anything like that.

question: will 4gb ram continue to be enough for the stuff I do over the next few years without slowing down, and is a 4gb with quad core better than an 8gb with dual core for my needs?

[The Comrade]

i'd go with the first one. it's much more future proof than the AMD. also shit eats RAM like crazy nowadays so go with 8.

[exploited]

Comrade is correct. 4GB is not nearly enough.

[uebermann]

just my opinion - neither. HPs are notoriously bad these days and have been that way for the past couple years. I'd shoot for Dell, Asus, or MSI.

IMO search Ebay and grab a good used laptop. If you got the time, wait for a steal of a deal. I watched for about two weeks and I got a hell of a deal on a Dell about a year ago. $225 US iirc.

edit: Oh and 4gb is plenty for what you say you are going to be using it for.

[Spider]

4 gb is OK for now. Going forward, eh...

I've got 4GB on this surface tablet, and it works fine, even with 3D CAD stuff...but its close. If you gotta have this little RAM, it pays to have a PCIE SSD for what ends up on the page file.

[uebermann]

Good thing about most laptops is RAM is extremely cheap and extremely easy to put in the laptop. So even if you just start out with 4gb, you should be able to upgrade pretty easily. Just check the model you are looking at first and make sure it can be accessed. I do not have any experience with ultrabooks so I don't know how those are in terms of hardware replacement.

[exploited]

You guys think that 4GB is enough? Huh. It isn't unknown for Windows 10 to use 1GB all on it's own. Add on Chrome, and you're getting damn close to using half your RAM just on the OS and a browser.

[John Galt]

no 4gb is not enough. frankly 8 isn't

and while it's fairly easy to add in more, you'd want to make sure your laptop could allow it. sometimes you don't have any more ports, and you're maxxed out on amount you can put in already

for basic stuff, ram is most important i think to stop you from getting frustrated with the machine. and i'd pick a SSD over a HDD any day. middle of road processor is fine.

[Spider]

...He says he just wants to browse the internet, run Word, run photoshop, etc. Very basic use case. 4 gigs is perfectly capable of that, at least for now. I can run Chrome with a bunch of tabs, excel, itunes, steam, etc, at the same time, and barely break 3 GB of usage. I don't imagine his perspective laptop, unless SERIOUSLY encumbered with bloat, would fare much worse than this cheapo atom powered tablet.

Goes without saying more is better.

[John Galt]

i'm currently running 44% of my 16GB of ram, and all i have is chrome open. chrome is a beast, and to use its snappiness you pay in ram by the gig. still, closing down all but this one leaves me with 30% still taken. i just have background crap running (steam, rainmeter etc). i had to get a new computer at work because having just a couple eclipse/intellij workspaces open + chrome + outlook eventually caught up with me and ground me to a halt with 8GB. and yeah, he's not doing that, but photoshop needs like 2.5GB of ram+ (it is recommended to set it to use 75% of available ram, whatever your available ram is, for optimal performance, so you want lots of ram). add in chrome for source material and windows operating system and you're gonna have a bad time

yeah 4 could work, but what i am saying is the most important piece of hardware for some who just wants a dicking around machine is the ram. i'd sacrifice everything else for better ram