Is it time for me to upgrade to a 32 GB gaming laptop?

#1

Is it time for me to upgrade to a 32 GB gaming laptop?

About 2 weeks ago I noticed that my current netbook (1gb ram, 1.6ghz N450 dual core) suddenly slowed down. It now struggles to play videos on youtube and CPU 1 is always at 100 % load, even when no programs are open.

I’m getting pissed off at this. Does anyone know some magical fix for this (Ubuntu 11.10)?

Also, would you recommend I get a 32gb ram , i7 gaming laptop? My logic is that even though I will only rarely use it for games, it should be future proofed for at least the next 7-8 years if it needs to be.

#2

If you are going to buy 32GB of ram buy a gun while youre at it and kill yourself

6GB is more than enough, if you have a huge monitor res get 8GB. Anything higher is stupid

#3

[quote=“Frell, post:2, topic:446578”]If you are going to buy 32GB of ram buy a gun while youre at it and kill yourself

6GB is more than enough, if you have a huge monitor res get 8GB. Anything higher is stupid[/quote]

Yeah, but I am thinking further into the future, more likely to get a 16 GB ram one instead.

#4

further intime gpus will be better and have more vram, cpu ram can only be used so fast.

(but isnt vram only used for textures?)

not sure but there is very little demand for more than 8gb of ram. XBox’s only have 512mb of ram, so even 4gb on a pc is a godsend to developers. But the next consoles will have 4gb of ram

#5

The only reason to get such a ram amount is if you know you will use it all up. As of right now I max out 2gbs of ram on my desktop even when I am running all my stuff on windows 7.

#6

I have 16GB of ram and I know I don’t need it all, you definitely do not need 32GB.

#7

do it and cache your entire OS into RAM

#8

Anywho, I’m not decided on what I am going to get yet.

Does anyone know what could possibly be causing this problem? I don’t really want to reinstall ubuntu/windows cause I have all of my schoolwork/other important things on here which I don’t want to risk losing (/backup failure). I also don’t want to go through all the effort of reconfiguring everything again…

#9

Have you ran or looked at anything to try and figure out what is causing the slowdown (‘top’ from the command line is a good starting point).

If I assume the screenshot you posted does something like ‘top’, then judging by the 0% CPU use, yet the high system load, my guess is it is probably a IO bound problem, probably when writing/reading from the hard disk. How fast is it, do you get any errors (run ‘dmesg’, look at /var/log/messages), and do you have enough free space etc etc?

#10

[quote=“Frell, post:2, topic:446578”]If you are going to buy 32GB of ram buy a gun while youre at it and kill yourself

6GB is more than enough, if you have a huge monitor res get 8GB. Anything higher is stupid[/quote]RAM usage has nothing to do with display, therefore your argument is void there. That’s VRAM, and nothing else.

#11

[quote=“Moparisthebest, post:9, topic:446578”]Have you ran or looked at anything to try and figure out what is causing the slowdown (‘top’ from the command line is a good starting point).

If I assume the screenshot you posted does something like ‘top’, then judging by the 0% CPU use, yet the high system load, my guess is it is probably a IO bound problem, probably when writing/reading from the hard disk. How fast is it, do you get any errors (run ‘dmesg’, look at /var/log/messages), and do you have enough free space etc etc?[/quote]

It only says 0% in the process list, but the resources graph tells another story, it seems to be cyclical, ie every 30 seconds it spikes.

Ended up being some udev-bridge problem

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/829980

#12

[quote=“Speljohan, post:10, topic:446578”][quote author=Frell link=topic=549447.msg4027796#msg4027796 date=1340488319]
If you are going to buy 32GB of ram buy a gun while youre at it and kill yourself

6GB is more than enough, if you have a huge monitor res get 8GB. Anything higher is stupid
[/quote]RAM usage has nothing to do with display, therefore your argument is void there. That’s VRAM, and nothing else.[/quote]
Oops. You need alot of RAM to work at a huge res in photoshop, got those mixed up.

#13

[quote=“runescape3dude, post:11, topic:446578”][quote author=Moparisthebest link=topic=549447.msg4028037#msg4028037 date=1340502028]
Have you ran or looked at anything to try and figure out what is causing the slowdown (‘top’ from the command line is a good starting point).

If I assume the screenshot you posted does something like ‘top’, then judging by the 0% CPU use, yet the high system load, my guess is it is probably a IO bound problem, probably when writing/reading from the hard disk. How fast is it, do you get any errors (run ‘dmesg’, look at /var/log/messages), and do you have enough free space etc etc?
[/quote]

It only says 0% in the process list, but the resources graph tells another story, it seems to be cyclical, ie every 30 seconds it spikes.

Ended up being some udev-bridge problem

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/829980[/quote]
sudo top