General laptop hardware question

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gordonbp
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General laptop hardware question

Post by gordonbp »

Hi,
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad i5 with 4GB RAM and a 320GB HDD running Mint 18.2
My question is, if you could only afford to upgrade one component, would it be RAM or HDD>SSD?
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Moem
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Moem »

HDD -> SSD.

My Thinkpad has similar specs and runs 17.3 Cinnamon just fine. It has a SSD.
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gordonbp
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by gordonbp »

Thanks for that - the thing is, my system is usually up at around 90% RAM usage, with 11 Chromium tabs open, Thunderbird and LO running. Is this normal?
Update - I'm on Cinnamon 18.1
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by MintBean »

I'm using 1.8Gb with Cinnamon, running one Firefox tab and Thunderbird.

If you're using 90% memory, then more memory is an obvious choice although otherwise I would generally say an SSD is a great upgrade.

Personally, I use a small SSD for my system drive (64Gb should be more than enough) and a separate spinny disc (which I put in place of the DVD drive on my laptop) to store data (music, pictures, e-books etc).
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Pierre
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Pierre »

gordonbp wrote: my system is usually up at around 90% RAM usage, with 11 Chromium tabs open,
why do you need so many Tabs open ? that in itself, is a memory hog.
- just saying. ..
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z31fanatic
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by z31fanatic »

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Get both and be happy.
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by gordonbp »

But that's the point of my question - I can't afford to do both!
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by dcrowder »

Pierre wrote:
gordonbp wrote: my system is usually up at around 90% RAM usage, with 11 Chromium tabs open,
why do you need so many Tabs open ? that in itself, is a memory hog.
- just saying. ..
Only 11... I have 20 open now!
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Dngrsone
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Dngrsone »

Which DE?

Personally, I'd go the RAM route. But I use KDE, which is resource-heavy, and I also open up dozens of tabs at a time.
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Hoser Rob »

Moem wrote:HDD -> SSD.

My Thinkpad has similar specs and runs 17.3 Cinnamon just fine. It has a SSD.
A machine with 4G RAM and an SSD will ruin Cinnamon brilliantly as long as it has a properly supported video card in Linux. I've seen many reports on forums where users with a lot of power were still getting poor Cinnamon (or Unity eg) performance because they didn't have 3D hardware accelerated video.

So the video card may be the bottleneck, but otherwise I'd agree that changing the spinner to an SSD would be best. But if you were running Cinnamon in 2G RAM I may suggest more RAM instead.
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gordonbp
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by gordonbp »

How do I find out if I have 3d accelerated video or not?
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AndyMH
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by AndyMH »

SSD

I've got a T430 with 8G RAM and a 240G SSD. RAM usage currently sat at 17%, not that I'm doing a lot, chromium. Running 18.1.
Thinkcentre M720Q - LM21.3 cinnamon, 4 x T430 - LM21.3 cinnamon, Homebrew desktop i5-8400+GTX1080 Cinnamon 19.0
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Cosmo. »

gordonbp wrote:the thing is, my system is usually up at around 90% RAM usage, with 11 Chromium tabs open, Thunderbird and LO running. Is this normal?
No. Currently my system uses 4.4 GB RAM with a virtual machine, Firefox (39 tabs in 2 windows open), Thunderbird, 2 document viewers and 1 Nemo window open (and a number of tools in my systray). The virtual machine alone uses 1.8 GB, so all the rest uses 2.6 GB, about 1 GB less than in your case. You should investigate, which of the open applications occupy this amount of RAM.

I use Mint 17.3, but this should not make such a big difference (if at all).

Another interesting question in this context: Does your system uses swap? How much?
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by z31fanatic »

gordonbp wrote:But that's the point of my question - I can't afford to do both!
Of course you can, an extra 4GB RAM is $30 at the most ;)
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Dngrsone »

z31fanatic wrote:
gordonbp wrote:But that's the point of my question - I can't afford to do both!
Of course you can, an extra 4GB RAM is $30 at the most ;)
That's still a lot of money to some people.
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by gordonbp »

Thanks for all the responses - I've sort of done some lateral thinking and changed from Cinnamon to xfce, which seems to be far less of a memory hog. With the same apps and web tabs open (Firefox not Chromium) I'm only using 50% of RAM....
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Re: General laptop hardware question

Post by Dngrsone »

Some would argue that unused RAM is wasted RAM, but I personally prefer some extra overhead for the occasional heavy load. I think xfce is a fine DE and have it on my laptop alongside KDE and Win 10 (of course, almost any DE is preferable to Win 10, but it does have its occasional use).
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