Can USB be used as RAM?

[xyz123]

Hi, asking for my uncle.

He has a laptop which he purchased few months ago and not knowing much he bought one with 8GB RAM. Now he is finding that 8GB is not sufficient due to use of teams/excel/chrome.

Unfortunately the RAM is soldered and can't be upgraded easily. I read somewhere USB can be used as RAM. Is this correct and has anyone got any experience of this? Laptop has usb 3 port if it matters.

I appreciate it may not be as good as onboard RAM but just wondering if it is better than no upgrade and may save buying a new laptop.

Thanks

[dundarach]

8gb should be more than enough?

Check his startups, has he loads of things loading up?

It can be used, it'll be slower, I'm assuming Windows 10, look for readyboost and get a decent stick!

(incidentally, this works laptop has 8g and currently has 4 word docs, 2 excel, teams never closes, 4 chrome windows, paint, and a gis mapping program running - and has sat like this all day - actually I never turn it off. No noticeable speed difference between this and a single window open - it's something else!)

Edited by dundarach on Thursday 14th July 15:31

[TTmonkey]

xyz123 said:

Hi, asking for my uncle.

He has a laptop which he purchased few months ago and not knowing much he bought one with 8GB RAM. Now he is finding that 8GB is not sufficient due to use of teams/excel/chrome.

Unfortunately the RAM is soldered and can't be upgraded easily. I read somewhere USB can be used as RAM. Is this correct and has anyone got any experience of this? Laptop has usb 3 port if it matters.

I appreciate it may not be as good as onboard RAM but just wondering if it is better than no upgrade and may save buying a new laptop.

Thanks

8gb should be enough. Does he have a page file set up? It should be automatically but just in case he hasn’t, set one up with a fixed amount of disk space allocated.

This article says you can:
https://howtofixwindows.com/use-usb-flash-drive-as...

However I’d suggest that he will lose data if the usb drive gets removed rudely whilst the OS is running.

Are you sure there isn’t an expandable slot for extra ram? On some laptops it’s under the keyboard.

[TTmonkey]

dundarach said:

8gb should be more than enough?

Check his startups, has he loads of things loading up?

It can be used, it'll be slower, I'm assuming Windows 10, look for readyboost and get a decent stick!

(incidentally, this works laptop has 8g and currently has 4 word docs, 2 excel, teams never closes, 4 chrome windows, paint, and a gis mapping program running - and has sat like this all day - actually I never turn it off. No noticeable speed difference between this and a single window open - it's something else!)

Edited by dundarach on Thursday 14th July 15:31

Totally agree. 8gb should be fine.

[mmm-five]

Would also help to know if it's got a tiny SSD as well...and if it's a proper 'laptop' and not a 'notebook' or 'chromebook'.

[xyz123]

Thanks for your replies. To answer omf of the questions/suggestions.

I will check re page file. SSD is 256GB and there is definitely not possible to upgrade RAM without desoldering. This is a trend with many of newer laptops having soldered laptops.Will also check re startup apps.

I have a work laptop with 16GB RAM (albeit with 7th gen Intel Processor. I don't know how newer processors affects RAM usage) and with teams plus chrome, outlook, excel and word I am upto 7.8GB so very close to 8GB.

Thanks again

Edit:its a "proper" laptop with Windows 10.

Edited by xyz123 on Thursday 14th July 16:02

[wyson]

Chrome can easily eat up 8gb by itself, if you like to open a crazy number of tabs.

Excel worksheets can be hundreds of MB, which in memory can use gigabytes. (I was actually swapped out of a 8gb laptop to a 16gb one for this reason. The work excel files had a ridiculous number of sheets, rows and macros and you’d have to open a few at once)

So to all the people saying 8gb is enough, the answer is, that it depends.

To the OP, just tell your uncle to get a new laptop. My Mrs also had this issue. Unless you live somewhere like Shenzhen or Hong Kong where people will swap the RAM modules for you, from what I could google, in the UK you are st out of luck. My Mrs started using Adobe CC, was fine at the start but as her work developed, she kept getting out of memory msgs.

Even the fastest SSD’s cant beat RAM. A USB scratch disk will be dreadfully slow.

Edited by wyson on Thursday 14th July 17:13

[eeLee]

MS brought out something called ReadyBoost many years ago allowing a USB stick to supplement RAM. It was rubbish then and I think it died a quick death.

If the thing has 8Gb RAM and an SSD then I could guess it's either crap spec or something is wrong. I have a Dell machine, 7 years old, fast SSD and 8GB RAM and I can do anything with it. The Surface Pro I type on is using 5.7Gb of RAM and I am using Edge with 25 tabs and Outlook on it.

If it is chronically slow, the SSD might be faulty. Since that's a hard fix, try a different browser. Edge, Brave, Vivaldi.

I would also scan the thing for PUPs using Malwarebytes because it is in theory a reasonable, middling spec.

[colin79666]

Is it really running into memory issues or just showing a lot of usage in task manager? Unless it is paging a lot out then it isn’t really an issue. Memory management in Windows still ain’t great but it has improved over recent versions. Often it is just preloading/caching and will dump that if an app actually needs the memory for something more important.

[sunbeam alpine]

Are you sure there's no expansion slot available?

I have an Asus laptop with 16GB - 8GB soldered and 8 GB in an expansion slot. The expansion slot is hidden under a metal protective plate (don't know why!).

[dundarach]

Can I have the old laptop, it'll be better than my 2008 HP6930p

[Jinx]

eeLee said:

MS brought out something called ReadyBoost many years ago allowing a USB stick to supplement RAM. It was rubbish then and I think it died a quick death.

If the thing has 8Gb RAM and an SSD then I could guess it's either crap spec or something is wrong. I have a Dell machine, 7 years old, fast SSD and 8GB RAM and I can do anything with it. The Surface Pro I type on is using 5.7Gb of RAM and I am using Edge with 25 tabs and Outlook on it.

If it is chronically slow, the SSD might be faulty. Since that's a hard fix, try a different browser. Edge, Brave, Vivaldi.

I would also scan the thing for PUPs using Malwarebytes because it is in theory a reasonable, middling spec.

Ready boost was more for acting as a cache for regularly used applications and was useful if you had a slow hard drive. With the reduction in costs of SSDs and NVME drives it became obsolete (read speeds were faster from the normal page file than the USB cache in ready boost).

Back on topic - what SSD is being used in the laptop and is there plenty of space on it - not all SSDs are equal so I would check the speed using CrystalDiskMark.

And as to 8GB not being enough - windows will use a lot if it is available but a fairly clean install of win10 with only teams running will use about 4GB (but have up to 4GB cached) when there is only 8GB available but on my 32GB machine this increases to 8 GB used with an additional 5.5GB cached.

[ARHarh]

just for interest, my system is using 7.3gb of memory right now running 5 tabs in chrome, Ispy camera software with 8 cameras and motion detection, email app and a handful of connection services for my home automation. So nothing too intensive right now and nearly used 8gb.

[dundarach]

There's some mighty inefficient installations out there...

Windows 11 i5 8gb - nothing open 2.4gb

Opened together:

Firefox 5 tabs
Outlook 2016
Autocad - loaded plan
Photoshop - loaded image
Word - loaded document
Excel

5.1gb

[xyz123]

dundarach said:

There's some mighty inefficient installations out there...

What does that mean in practical terms and what can be done by end user. I have found in the past that chrome hogs a lot of memory so switch to Edge or Firefox helps. Obviously closing unnecessary applications helps but other than that what can end user do about "inefficiency" you mentioned?

[xyz123]

sunbeam alpine said:

Are you sure there's no expansion slot available?

I have an Asus laptop with 16GB - 8GB soldered and 8 GB in an expansion slot. The expansion slot is hidden under a metal protective plate (don't know why!).

Yes confirmed. No expansion slot.

[xyz123]

Jinx said:

eeLee said:

MS brought out something called ReadyBoost many years ago allowing a USB stick to supplement RAM. It was rubbish then and I think it died a quick death.

If the thing has 8Gb RAM and an SSD then I could guess it's either crap spec or something is wrong. I have a Dell machine, 7 years old, fast SSD and 8GB RAM and I can do anything with it. The Surface Pro I type on is using 5.7Gb of RAM and I am using Edge with 25 tabs and Outlook on it.

If it is chronically slow, the SSD might be faulty. Since that's a hard fix, try a different browser. Edge, Brave, Vivaldi.

I would also scan the thing for PUPs using Malwarebytes because it is in theory a reasonable, middling spec.

Ready boost was more for acting as a cache for regularly used applications and was useful if you had a slow hard drive. With the reduction in costs of SSDs and NVME drives it became obsolete (read speeds were faster from the normal page file than the USB cache in ready boost).

Back on topic - what SSD is being used in the laptop and is there plenty of space on it - not all SSDs are equal so I would check the speed using CrystalDiskMark.

And as to 8GB not being enough - windows will use a lot if it is available but a fairly clean install of win10 with only teams running will use about 4GB (but have up to 4GB cached) when there is only 8GB available but on my 32GB machine this increases to 8 GB used with an additional 5.5GB cached.

Thanks for your reply. Don't have details of SSD but will check the speed. SSD has about 35% spare capacity.

[dundarach]

xyz123 said:

dundarach said:

There's some mighty inefficient installations out there...

What does that mean in practical terms and what can be done by end user. I have found in the past that chrome hogs a lot of memory so switch to Edge or Firefox helps. Obviously closing unnecessary applications helps but other than that what can end user do about "inefficiency" you mentioned?

Check start up files (ctrl alt del - task manager startup close them all, reboot check things work!)

Check there's not a load of services hogging things (go careful stopping services, google which ones you can stop if required)

Uninstall (or close) daft programs which insist on opening (Onedrive\Skype\Steam\Zoom\Teams\Office\Itunes and so on) get them all closed down and open them as you need them (often a big one!!)

Check virus protection are you using something vast and inflated, are there a load of monitoring things actually slowing it down (MS own is more than enough, never been impressed with mcAfee and all that other ste)

Do you need to use chrome, try firefox or edge is that any better

That'd be my first things to do.

[Frik]

Try disabling Hardware Acceleration in Teams, too.

Teams can be st for resources. I've got an i7 and 32GB of RAM but it's still no match for Teams having a bad day.

[xeny]

8GB will be at best tight. Teams is a hog.

Presuming it is Windows 11, unpinning Edge and the Windows 11 specific Teams application from the task bar will stop them being part loaded into RAM on login. That will help if he isn't using them. - see https://winaero.com/unpin-teams-from-taskbar-in-wi... .