I just got a new laptop!

It is a Dell Inspiron 15 3452, it has a Core i3 4030U, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HDD, and overall it is nice. I will not game much on it, but if I do, it will fare OK, because the games I play at school are like Windows Store games, and games on Steam like Garry's Mod and Unturned. What do you guys think? Here is the product page: http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-3542-laptop/pd?oc=fncwg2324b&model_id=inspiron-15-3542-laptop

 

It should be fine for basic games. If you play Gmod on it, don't blow things up.

 

Yeah, but I need to get some more RAM for it because Windows 8.1 is a hog. Running Flatgrass bare, Chrome, Spotify, and HWMonitor I hit 88% RAM usage.

 

Windows 8.1 isn't a hog. Chrome is, and probably Spotify as well.
When you play a game, just close everything else.

 

This is pretty much correct.
Windows 8 is just a bit of a hog compared to other operating systems, but his problem is most likely Chrome.

 

Or his PC is filled with crapware. I'm running 8.1, and despite having only 4GB of memory, I rarely go over 80% usage regardless of whether I'm on a game or not.

 

This is probably it as well.
IIRC, Dell ships their computers with loads upon loads of bloat.

 

Windows 8 uses less RAM than previous windows version. With steam going alongside many chrome tabs I have 1.8gb used.

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A metric crap ton, which is hard to achieve as data is effectively massless

 

Let's delete some of that bloat, shall we? I will update after.

 

operating systems are designed to allocate memory to the fullest extent possible. unused ram is wasted ram. just because your os reports that you're using 80% of your ram at some given time it does not mean that you need more. the os will reallocate and page memory as necessary, and you won't even notice unless you're really straining things.

 

I am a power user, after all. Deleted a lot of bloatware from the system, and here's the result.

 

Here's mine with Win 8.1 update 1 pro:



Programs running: Firefox with a few tabs, windows live mail, media player, real temp, classic shell and gadgets. It is at least 500mb lower than win 8 with the same programs opened.

And for some reason the page file is just 1gb in size, whereas with win 8 it used to be about the same size of my RAM (8gb), I also checked my brother's pc using win 8.1 as well with 4gb RAM and he also has a 1gb page file (windows auto settings)

 

My win 7 pagefile was 2gb, its 3gb on brothers netbook. Weird. I don't like to mess with it too much.

 

I just got my mac (specs below) and then learned that Apple gave it a preformance update that I wish I had waited for. Oh well. I barely use all of that ram though. Sketch up and chrome seem to like it though. Any idea why google likes to use up a lot of system resources?

I actually thought about getting that laptop as well but wanted OSX for all of my movie making - editing.

 

I had my page file disabled in win 8 because I thought it would be faster having everything on the RAM, but then I was forced to enable it after playing Watch Dogs, that game eats ram for breakfast , it kept crashing and telling me windows was running out of memory. The first time I enabled it my page file was 14gb in size. The next day it was 11gb, the next day 9gb, and eventually it stabilized in 8gb until I upgraded to 8.1.