Memory issue?

[Guest]

TL;DR

Alt tabbing takes a long time. Is RAM the limiting factor? It must be paging to the several year old hdd. 

 

Long:

I’m fairly certain this is a “4GB RAM isn’t enough” issue. 

 

Basically this laptop is just used for google chrome, YouTube, google, eBay so on. Sometimes microsoft word is used. It can take minutes to alt tan to word or open task manager with only 4-8 google chrome tabs open. It came with windows 7 as the sticker on the bottom says. Now it’s running Windows 10. 

Upgrade RAM? There’s a second slot available, I already checked.  

[sh4z]

It may not be paging, Generally Windows works better with more than 4GB of RAM. Since your talking about a HDD, it could be disk fragmentation also (maybe try defrag?), if you've used a machine with an SSD in it everything else is going to feel slow regardless (Sorry). you might actually get more benefit from an SSD...

 

Newer Windows 10 actually is pretty good with memory use, you can just open Task manager to see if its paging to disk (using heaps of memory), or whether its actually waiting for disk I/O (Read / Write), Perfmon (performance monitor) might be useful here to diagnose what exactly is causing the issue, have a look at the disk queues (Avg Disk Queue).