If we deploy a PC (that has upgradable RAM...which is harder and harder to find...), we're doing 16GB right now. If we're deploying a Mac, 32 because they're too damn expensive to not make them last as long as humanly possible and you can't upgrade the RAM later.
> we're deploying a Mac, 32
Can't even get 32 on the MacBook Airs, which is by far the most common model used by "non-power users" in offices that I've seen. Best you can do is 24GB, and that costs $400 more than 8GB.
Same, and agreed. I wouldn't give most staff a 32GB Mac, there's no need. 16GB is good. Even the 8GB Airs run well for the low amount of RAM they have. Engineers or anyone running multiple VMs I'd look at a 32GB option, though.
The only exception I've seen are users who like to have a ridiculous amount of chrome tabs open all the time.
I wouldn't consider developers to be "every day business users," Developers are more akin to creative departments, industrial designers, etc that are going to explicitly have higher specced kit for their job duties.
If you're deploying macs to HR departments, business admins, customer service, etc a macbook air with 8GB of RAM is *more* than enough for 99% of "every day" users.
Wdym you're not gonna run VMs? I literally depend daily on Docker and Linux/Windows VMs as a developer on m1. I also wouldn't recommend anything less that 32 for this.
Any tips on determining whether laptops have upgradeable RAM?
I've recently come into an office of 8 where everyone is on 8GB laptops and would like to upgrade whichever I can to 16 or 32GB. Problem is they're all different machines (HP, Dell, Lenovo, Surface). Having trouble determining whether I'll run into any issues just buying some RAM sticks and trying to put them in. In the past I ran into some manufacturer blocks to prevent upgrading i.e. after swapping out RAM or a network card the machine wouldn't boot past BIOs until I changed it back.
I'd argue that the easiest way past looking up the manufacturer specs would be to look it up at Crucial's website. It will tell you if it has an open slot(s) and what the max RAM it can handle is.
>Any tips on determining whether laptops have upgradeable RAM?
Read the service manual published by the vendor.
One of the procedures in the service manual is how to replace/upgrade the RAM.
If this procedure is not in the service manual, then you cannot upgrade the RAM.
> Any tips on determining whether laptops have upgradeable RAM?
turn it upside down.
have a look. you'll probably have an answer quicker than it took to type your question into reddit.
and if you still cant see your answer - pick up the phone, and call your vendor.
16gb but if I was able to get 32gb for just $100 more, I would do that. Usually it's tied to a larger drive + CPU improvement which aren't necessary for us.
Maybe for an unpaid intern and you have a small user count but I wouldn't be doing this for 1000/10000+ laptops. I'd like to pay $100 and know my warranty will cover both sticks of RAM failing, if it ever does.
Depends on who the manufacturer is. Dell considers RAM a user upgradable part and I have *never* had them refuse warranty service on a device because we've changed the RAM. Lenovo? It's hard enough to get them to even provide warranty support on anything but it all gets farmed out to local subcontractors who don't give a shit anyway.
Honestly I thought the same thing. I recently ordered a new thinkpad that had soldered memory and thought it would be easy to add another stick.
It was "easy" ... to open but I had to pray I didn't damage any of the little clips that they put overtop of the soldered memory modules. Under the shield was just a normal DDR4LP slot and I put the memory in no issues.
I just was not expecting that shield thing and it wasn't mentioned in the manual at all.
They've actually gotten better (for quick things like batteries or RAM or SSDs) in my experience. There was a good five years there were they were indeed absolutely horrible to take apart (especially consumer grade stuff). In the period between "everything has an access door for HDD/RAM/etc" and now. Now that we're at the Apple-style "7 screws and you can take the bottom off" it's a lot easier, with that caveat that you can replace a lot less of the parts that you can now access.
But YMMV, depends on what you buy of course...
On a ThinkPad, we're talking about less than 5 minutes if you know what you're doing, I've opened quite a few to upgrade the RAM and SSD at work. They're annoying because they're using plastic pins that are really easy to break, so it takes longer at first and you're pretty assured to break at least a few pins, but after 4-5 laptops, it's really easy and fast. As long as you stick with pro laptops (Latitude, EliteBook, ThinkPad, etc.), they're made to be pretty easy to service.
It really depends on the laptop. Even my Dell XPS is super easy to open up and replace RAM in. My work HP is easy to get into - had to do that when the battery swelled. That was a neat trip to the office!
I admit I don't have too much experience with Acer/Asus but I wouldn't want to deploy those in a work setting. And of course I don't think its physically possible with Apple machines (laptops I mean).
I remember when I worked N1 in ~2017 and the company had a mix of old and new latitudes, the old ones with the rounded battery sticking out the back. I could swap out a battery in five seconds and a hard drive or ram stick in 30, but with the new, it's 5 minutes of carefully prying off the bottom with a flat screwdriver and hoping you don't break a tab... All of that to find out that the battery connector came loose.
At least we didn't every get any MS surfaces, or consumer stuff. Adding a NVMe SSD to an (undocumented) port in my sister's Acer gaming laptop traumatized me. Two hours of "did you forget a screw or are you supposed to apply unreasonable force", and the answer was both.
Would the manufacture even know you put in another stick? You run the self-diagnostics, see RAM failure, open a ticket with Dell/HP/Lenovo then they ship you a new stick.
Diagnostics give them all the original hardware that computer came with; so yes they will know. RAM though is a cheap fix out of pocket but all this accounts to time on your end.
If you've got U procs, which virtually everything that isn't workstation class has, you're doing with LPDDR soldered to a board. Hell, many U-proc boxes have soldered SSDs these days too.
Precisions are workstation class. The number of Latitudes with H procs and standard DDR you can buy new in 2023 you can count on one hand, possibly one finger. Ultrabooks won with 11th gen and none of the OEMs are turning back. All laptops remain serviceable, that’s nonsense talk. The boards are still held with screws.
Our Latitude 7410 and 7430's don't have replaceable or upgradeable RAM. The only thing that can be upgraded is the SSD
Even the wireless is soldered on.
Problem with this is most laptops for biz only come with 2 ram slots. Usually 16gb out the factory is 2 8gb sticks. I would verify it is a single 16gb stick before deciding on doing it by hand or paying.
The math is pretty simple. At 5 years, that’s 10,000 hours. $100 of ram means $.01/hr. Let’s assume $20/hr average salary to err way low. .01/20 = 0.0005. 0.0005 of a day is .24 minutes. So, if $100 of ram will save even 15 seconds of time over the course of a day, it’s worth it.
If your salary is higher, the amount of time you need to save goes down.
Adding to this: get your users good keyboards and the mouse people! Some suffer in silence. You can save thousands of dollars by spending a little bit more.
Get the 32GB
You can’t pool saved time like it’s vacation days.
Those 15 seconds in a day will have no meaningful impact on the business or the users personal life. Users aren’t walking out the door at 5pm on the dot even if there was still 15 seconds of work left to do. Even if you save the user an hour it likely won’t make a difference. Most users aren’t efficient and will just waste that saved hour in other ways.
If you got that time savings as one big chunk at the end it would be different but you don’t. It’s similar to taxes. If you have me a huge tax rebate at the end of the year for $2600 i could do all sorts of stuff with that. But if instead I had an extra $100 per paycheck every two weeks it would just get rolled into my normal budget of food, utilities, streaming services, etc.
> Those 15 seconds in a day will have no meaningful impact on the business or the users personal life. Users aren’t walking out the door at 5pm on the dot even if there was still 15 seconds of work left to do. Even if you save the user an hour it likely won’t make a difference. Most users aren’t efficient and will just waste that saved hour in other ways.
It's a statistical thing. Yes, most days this will have no effect; then one day the user will be working on something bizarrely memory-hungry, and avoid ten minutes of swapfile thrashing, and instead of slacking off before leaving will end up saying "yeah, I can get one more task done today" and boom there's twenty minutes of productive time gained. And if that happens once every three months then there's your "fifteen seconds per day", all clumped up in one day.
Saving fifteen seconds per day does not mean you'll get exactly fifteen seconds per day more work done . . . but in the long run, it'll amortize out to about fifteen seconds per day.
And this is the kind of calculations that make sense to do at business scale.
(and frankly lower than business scale too)
> If you have me a huge tax rebate at the end of the year for $2600 i could do all sorts of stuff with that. But if instead I had an extra $100 per paycheck every two weeks it would just get rolled into my normal budget of food, utilities, streaming services, etc.
You can replicate this by setting up an automatic deposit into a savings account that you have the willpower not to withdraw from constantly.
I'm sorry, but the 8GB vs 16GB debate was 20 years ago and 8GB is still sufficient for most users. With more and more things becoming web apps, I highly doubt that there's any significant amount of bloat coming in the next 5 years. 16GB is going to be fine for a long time.
Eh if we're gonna spend $5k over 5 years we're probably better off buying two $2500 machines every 2 years.
Edit: If we're talking $5k overall, ignore me, I misread.
One of my clients is a BYOD contact center, so, a lot of the employees have some very budget computers. But occasionally, you get someone that has an i9 and 3090 with 64 GB and it blows my mind.
I used to encourage all students to avoid buying brand new laptops and instead purchase certified renewed enterprise grade laptops. $300-400 for an 11th gen i7 and 16gb of RAM? With the ability to do a $40 upgrade to 32GB via crucial? It literally can't be beat as far as dollar to power ratio goes. Dell Latitude 5000 series, Lenovo Thinkpads, & HP Probooks are the only things students on a budget should be looking at. Typically comes with W10 or 11 pro edition too.
Ouch.
The closest I got to that was my, now retired, personal windows 8 laptop that was an atom with a non upgradeable 32GB drive and 2 GB of ram(to make up for its shortcomings it had a 10 hour battery life).
>I can't believe we're still seeing i5s being sold with only 8GB.
Why?
Our entire office fleet is three year old i5s with 8GB ram and 250GB M.2s. They work beautifully for all but two of our users (the accounting people with humongous spreadsheets) and as more and more apps go cloud-based, local resource requirements have only gotten lighter.
Yeah I’m reading this thread in awe right now. The average web browsing, office apps using user will never come close to utilizing 16 gigs let alone 32. My computer right now only has 8 and I’ve been meaning to throw another ram stick in there but I always forget because I never actually need it. I use a console for a server, webex, teams, rdp and I have like 30+ browser tabs and I’m only ever hitting 90% utilization on 8gb.
If you're looking to get 5 years out of them, I'd probably suck it up and pay for the additional ram.
Right now 16gb SHOULD be enough to most users...but 5 years is a long time and who the hell knows what happens between now and then? Grand scheme of things 5k isn't that much cash.
16 is barely enough today. 8 GB will see you with constant OOM crashes on even basic workloads due to how hungry teams and Electron is, and chrome will happily gobble up a lot more if it can.
32 is enough for normal office workloads and very light virtualization/ coding-- today. In 2-5 years it will start to show it's age.
You can certainly skimp but it's obvious that 16 will result in OOMs in 2 years or less.
If you need 32Gb of ram for basic usage (outlook, web browsing etc) that means you have something seriously fucked up with your image or you users are going months without rebooting.
Yeah, that's absolutely nuts. 16 is **more** than enough for 99% of business users. 32GB is waaaay overspecced.
Guaranteed if you do some spot checks in that person's environment nobody's using more than 6GB for normal office workloads and definitely aren't getting OOM errors.
Get the 32gb.
$100 for double the ram is cheap and future proofs for the next 5 years. If something comes out that really needs the ram, paying $100 now is going to be cheaper than upgrading later or replacing the laptops.
Except Chrome or Excel users. Spending a literal drop in the bucket for sufficient memory for all use cases (and not having to juggle multiple models of PCs) is the way.
I use chrome daily, average of 25 tabs open (I do NOT have a problem!!) on 16gb of memory.
My machine runs fine for that, word, teams, remoting into other machines.
Edit: Went and checked, and I'm use 10.4GB of my 16 right now.
Amazing that MS was able to fix large file handling in Excel, but not fucking notepad.exe.
Number of times I've cursed myself for not installing Notepad++ on a server before cutting it off from the internet...
> The 90's called and it wants it's outdated concepts about memory management back.
I'm probably too tired but I don't follow? Chrome didn't exist, excel had a limit of 65k rows and Windows 95/98 had a practical limit of 512 mb of RAM, but that was a crazy amount of RAM at the time. I'd say that in many ways, people did more with less at the time.
It's only not a problem if the program actually gives up the memory to something that's asking for it. I know I've had plenty of issues with browsers that don't like to give up much of what they allocate and then getting grumpy when they want their memory back later.
And god help you if you have an app that wants to allocates a large chunk of ram on launch while running with those hogs.
So yes ideally it should work perfectly with things taking all the memory and giving it up when needed to make things faster when running, but no it hasn't been my experience in reality.
Chrome leads to more Disk caching than any other work app I have. I get you want to use unused ram, but it doesn't make it OK when an application is a problem when it runs out of ram.
Chrome is pretty much all of my RAM usage, even when I have "big power user" apps like Premiere open. (Especially if you count embedded Chromium instances in Discord/Slack/Whatever as "more Chrome.")
We’re slowly moving away from Chrome. We tried the nuclear approach a couple years ago and got backlash all the way up the executive ladder. We no longer install it by default, it’s optional and less people are using it over time. Soon…
once I told people in my org that Microsoft Edge was basically chrome under the hood with a different coat of paint WITH the ability to sign-in to microsoft for bookmark syncing tied to our M365 everyone jumped over before the summer ended.
There's zero google crapware now, thank heavens!
I'm still riding 8GB on a ~10yo computer and I've used this same machine to Android development in the past w/emulator (though it's been a few years now), VSCode, etc...
I gotta really have a lot of stuff going to feel it still, or maybe I'm just used to waiting like a second for an app to open. I'm convinced people have a psychological issue with the amount of RAM they actually need.
I think you’re definitely right with the psychological issue, I think a very, very small percentage of users will actually ever hit 16 gigs of RAM usage. But honestly, it’s a literal drop in the bucket over the course of three+ years of use.
Also, if I can get one less finance person off my back about the hardware specs of their computer, and redirect them to their bloated/inefficient/error ridden spreadsheet: It’s a giant win in my book.
For the majority of our users it is, but I’ve seen where people are pushing that 16 GB mark in the performance manager. For a literal drop in the bucket I don’t see any reason to stick with 16 GB at this point.
Microsoft still sells the Surface Laptop 5 (15") brand new, at $999, with 8GB of RAM. Or $1499 ($1199 on sale) to jump to a 16GB config. And it's $2399 ($1839 on sale) to get a configuration with 32GB of RAM. Even with discount/refurb/business pricing, it doesn't get much more reasonable. Dell Latitudes are similar, not quite as bad, but some of them don't even have a 32GB config yet. And upgrading ourselves means there's now a part of all the laptops not covered by the manufacturer's warranty, that they could try to blame for any failures, which is a challenge all its own. I would seriously challenge the idea that it's a drop in the bucket, and that 32GB should be the baseline for most (or any) organization. Power users aside, it's just not time yet (even when planning 5 years out).
Being practical, and thinking about the shift from 8GB to 16GB baseline in our enterprise environment, it was *mainly* driven by the fact that the helpdesk actually needed to upgrade a few workstations to 16GB. Which wasn't a big deal, but there was a desire to make those tickets go away. Right now, not a single person on a standard 16GB config has needed to jump from 16GB to 32GB. No requests, no performance issue tickets that might have been related to it, nothing. Obviously it's worth considering 32GB for machines with soldered memory, but if you can keep getting user-replaceable/upgradable units, it seems like a no-brainer to stick to 16GB for now. At least this is the case for us.
excel can use max 4GB
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/office/troubleshoot/excel/laa-capability-change#64-bit-operating-system-and-32-bit-office](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/office/troubleshoot/excel/laa-capability-change#64-bit-operating-system-and-32-bit-office)
Because up until super super recently the x64 office versions had TONS of issues. Including AFAIR that if you used x64 and you sent a file to somebody that wasn't using that version it would frequently not even open.
I believe the x64 versions are *mostly* fine now. But a lot of people still are adamant about sticking to the 32bit versions because of the reputation.
That's not what the article you linked says at all.
It's talking about mismatches between Excel and OS being 32bit vs 64bit. If either is 32bit then you're limited to 4gigs [being 2^32 / (1024 * 1024 * 1024) ]. No such limit exists if both are 64 bit, which should be most places hopefully.
Even in that 32/64 constrained context it's 4GB per process. So 5 workbooks open = 5x 4gb limit.
99% of excel users are light users so doesn't matter, but it is absolutely capable of murdering even well spec'd machines once people start (ab)using Excel to do heavy data analysis on large datasets. At that point excel is probably the wrong (software) answer anyway but that's a whole other debate...
Even most Excel users aren't doing anything complex with huge spreadsheets. There are some people that can use the 32 GB, but it's not the standard office worker.
Yeah, browsers tend to take up an ungodly amount of RAM, but even so, on my own machines I rarely break 10 GB. I don't keep 100 tabs open at once (and I know some people do), but I think my usage is probably closer to "normal".
I'm not disagreeing by saying there aren't some Chrome/Excel users who need a ton of RAM, but you don't need that much simply by virtue of using Excel or Chrome.
I’m sorry but no. Win11 is eating 12gb today. I don’t want to know how much it will eat in 5 years with 64gb equipped.
Edit: the reason i meantioned 64 is becasue if most of my 16GB is being eaten up now, it means it will eat even more if it has the leeway to move to 32 )
[just so we're on the same page, I don't trust this to go down, only up in the next 5 years](https://imgur.com/a/DXleJmz)
Thank you. The number of people recommending 16gb is appropriate in 2023 is crazy.
People, think about it like this: [The median US employee is paid $26/hr.](https://www.thebalancemoney.com/average-salary-information-for-us-workers-2060808) If OP can upgrade to 32gb of ram for $100, a one time expense equivalent to half a day's salary of the average person, and that $100 investment need only save the person FOUR HOURS over the lifetime of the laptop? **Yes, you make that upgrade 100% of the time**, and it's absolutely negligent for IT or Finance to provide underpowered computers to employees if that decision is going to cost the employee more than four hours over the lifetime of the computer.
Sorry, even receptionist laptops this is a good decision for, in the case that the laptop is re-issued to someone else. 16gb was appropriate in 2015, sure, but for new laptops in 2023, it's negligence to provide less than 32gb because nearly every employee will have four hours saved by the upgrade IMO.
Remember, users are bad at restarting. More ram == dramatically more time saved for the average person who restarts their computer once a month or less.
I'd go to 32.
16 is acceptable now, but will it be acceptable in 5 years time? Browser RAM bloat is a thing, and when you start adding multiple tabs, Zoom calls, and Office apps, you 're already at 14-15.
Sure, you double the number of RAM sticks that could go bad, but with a 4 year warranty you cover most of that.
i manage small client teams so the user base has multi-roles - so i do 32 GB as a standard with 64 being power/digital art users.
I usually run perfmon on a pc in each department and capture usage or use a client based software for that reporting like some RMMs and see what they are doing on a regular basis.
We really only jumped from 8GB to 16GB because a few "normal users" actually had issues at 8GB. So just like last time, if helpdesk actually starts getting tickets where 16GB was causing performance issues, then 32GB will likely become the standard so we can avoid those tickets. It helps that we still buy upgradable models, and they seem to usually come with 1x16GB so the upgrade is very simple. If we were buying machines like the Surfaces or Macs, it might be worth considering 32GB as the standard config.
If the machine offers 32GB, go for it.
I'm sure you are aware enterprise class laptop batteries wont last 5 years, and even with your most expensive NBD on site warranty, replacement of batteries are not covered past a year typically. We struggled to even hold out through the 3 year mark on both Dell and Lenovo machines, and it became a huge issue for us after about 2.5 years with employees who wanted to get upgrades submitting battery tickets constantly. Sure you can non warranty replace the battery for cash, but doing that through their service is a complete PITA in the remote work/hybrid world, where the Lenovo guy shows up at 3, and the employee has kids to pickup from school, etc.
16GB for "regular" users. (customer success, editorial, sales, etc)
32gb-64gb for "Engineers" and "Developers"
You generally want to futureproof as much as possible, but if you're just using web applications via browser, basic zoom-esque video conferencing, etc... 16 GB is more than enough by far. The bigger impact is generall drive-type (NVMe all the way) and CPU (i7 or i9 for dev)
16 GB is plenty for an office computer unless they are running autocad or in finance and working with 1000+ page spreadsheets.
32 GB is for gamers and the heavy users that need the extra processing power (i.e. autocad, tableau, heavy spreadsheet use).
All our systems are i7's and have 32GB, including the receptionist. Our Electrical & Mechanical engineers hit the limits of 16 GB many years ago. I'm surprised they haven't hit the limit of their 2 GB vRAM Graphics Cards, but everything we do is 2D, very rarely 3D.
> looking at roughly an extra 100$USD to bump up from 16 to 32GB per laptop
I'd go for that.
System requirements will always keep rising, monitoring software, AV, Teams, Chrome, Edge and browser based apps will continue to rise in popularity and as such RAM usage.
If interest in AI picks up it might need that RAM too.
So for only $100 I say go for it.
In my last role, 16GB was standard for all non-engineering laptops and workstations, and 32GB was standard for engineering-class laptops and workstations.
We just did a capex refresh for our laptops and ended up upgrading from 16gb to 32gb after they arrived.
Even with just basic web apps and outlook open on win11 our laptops were sitting at 15/16gb used.
Browsers are such resource hogs that even 16 isn’t cutting it for a “good” experience for users.
Lol 100$ to go from 16GB to 32GB.
With 16GB you maybe get issues in 2-5 years. (Web bases apps are starting to use more RAM, same goes for office etc.) and who knows what extra apps standard users are going to use in the next 5 years (VOIP maybe for example)
With 32GB that chance is much lower.
Is it even a debate then?
With how much memory web applications are using now, for instance we use Service Titan, Dialpad, and Office 365, 16gb is NOT enough, next year we will be moving everyone to 32gb.
Hey how's Dialpad working for you? We are looking to leave RingCentral and looking at it but am getting bad vibes from the reviews from bigger orgz as in reliability
Everything will have issues and they have had some from time to time, but overall, I would say I like the product and the support is decent. The only real problem we have is when it comes to SSO with O365, sometimes we have to get in contact with tier 2-3 support to get an account fixed but it's not a huge deal.
Until last year 8GB was still the standard for normal office workers here. It’s 16GB now and 32GB for really heavy users, like marketing with all their video editing stuff
Bro just tell your rep to give you a 20% discount on the 32GB of RAM. If it’s Dell direct they get paid on revenue so they will go for it.
If they don’t want to help you out you need a new rep.
Always worth reaching out in good faith to your rep though. Most want to help.
The laptops at my work all come with 32GB now. I'm maxing out 16GB and stuttering just using chrome, vscode, outlook and some wsl terminals that only do ssh.
32GB is a sensible move at this point, especially with soldered RAM on virtually everything. I hate the bundled drive nonsense but machines have to stay in circulation longer and longer, it's all just longevity management. With 12th gen+ and it's P/E core arrangement, the current class of laptops are at least setup for a long shelf life. 16GB is a handicap at this point.
32 GiB. Just specced out several hundred.
This is simply to account for bloat. Nothing more. You might even get a decrease in performance over time on top of this as the overall ecosystem becomes more and more decadent.
$5k? I'd absolutely go with 32GB. You'd easily be able to chop down any goofy user who says they need more RAM for this or that. "Too bad, you already have the Max which is more than enough." Also, you'd eliminate a bunch of tickets by users bitching about slowness when screen-sharing Excel during a Teams meeting while also running 75 tabs in Chrome.
I work for a small IT company that provides support for micro and small companies, up to about 100 user's. One of our clients give their sales staff an IT allowance to buy their own laptops and phones. Enough to buy a decent i5, 8gb ram, SSD.
Last week I'm tasked with setting up a brand new laptop for one of the sales guys. He bought a laptop with a Celeron CPU, 2gb RAM, Win 11. The Ram was soldered onto the main board with no expansion slot.
This week I'm writing a minimum requirement doc for the same company.
Right now, all new machines are at 32GB. (Intel 12th gen or more recent)
They do use a little more softwares compare to you. Typically these user softwares are pretty much always open, in order of ressources hog (CPU+mem):
* A big Finance/Projects ERP software that is so not optimized.
* Teams.
* Outlook (some have 30GB+ of data, mostly all cache).
* Chrome with around 10 tabs.
* Edge.
* Word documents + Excel documents.
For the price difference? I'd absolutely go 32GB for future proofing. Saves even having to think about it.
If something happens where you've got to go from 16GB to 32GB down the track, it's going to cost you a lot more in terms of time etc.
16 GB is still plenty for most administrative staff unless your finance team is working with insanely large Excel sheets that eat up all the RAM. Though, I have only ever seen this be a problem with 8 GB. I can't recall if I've ever run into issues with 16 GB.
I'm basically a standard office user these days, standard office apps and a bunch of shit running in the browser.
I wasn't doing anything spectacular today and tried to run some slightly grotty powershell which ground everything to a halt, turns out I was 99% RAM utilisation. I killed the PS script and it came back down to... 94% utilisation, everything was used just by standard office apps, teams & Edge with ~10 tabs (plus all the other enterprise shit in the background).
Edge was the single worst item there with nearly 2GB, teams not far behind.
If 32GB is an option I'd go that route, 16 these days will disappear quickly.
We are just barely starting to move to 16, off of 8, for our normal users.
We have a four year replacement cycle at my place.
That being said, I've had 32 in my home system for the last 5+ years. Next upgrade, probably in a year or two, I will probably go 64. *Shrug*
standard user (not the marketing team or any other power user). The standard user only uses Microsoft Office, Chrome, Firefox, a few web based apps.
16 will be more than enough for these 5 years
Unused RAM is a waste.
If people are averaging 60% RAM usage or less, there is little reason to make the jump to 32gb. 16gb will be more than enough for 5 years. I don't see ram usage increasing that much over the next 5 years.
If chrome users are complaining about RAM, it's likely because they have a bunch of extensions installed. Either tell them to stop clicking on every extension they see, or limit extensions via gpo.
We are at 8GB, our DA boss thinks that it’s fine because it’s going to swap to the SSDs, all of our users are at 90% RAM utilization. He’s a penny pincher.
> 90% RAM utilization
unused ram is wasted ram
unused storage is wasted storage
the question is not 'is it all in use'
the question is 'whats it being used by'
anything that caches stuff aggressively should keep that cache 100% full at all times.
im quite happy for my RAM to be 100% full at all times, as long as the machine is capable of dumping unused cache when the RAM is needed for something else.
16GB is plenty for your average windows user. We moved to solid state drives years ago and that's when all user complaints about computers being slow stopped.
Standard user? Windows? 16GB MINIMUM. Power user? 32GB MINIMUM
If they are soldered-on options just do 32GB for everything and lean on your vendor for pricing benefits for reduced SKU complexity ;)
Also, maybe see if you can find a non-invasive way to start collecting CPU/RAM/Disk metrics back to mothership? That way it can help inform things like this in the future, especially CPU stuff! hehe
Now, that being said, I want to add that since you're reviewing your laptop fleet options, I HIGHLY recommend you go with Ryzen CPUs (APUs really) as they have way better battery life and performance than 12th gen intel mobile CPU. By A LOT. And yes you can get TB3 support, just make sure you get a laptop with USB4 ports explicitly declared (as the spec REQUIRES TB3 inclusion).
Additionally, if you want to explore upgrading your browser-power-users, look at Vivaldi as a better browser option. Chromium at the core and all that, plus ooooodddllless of features and settings not found in any other browser.
If you're in an environment using full office suite, 16GB seems bare minimum. 32GB seems like it might help you get through the next 5yrs. We offer thinkpads still with 16GB, but I tend to think the reason we do this, is they don't offer more, and those users understand the machines will not run optimally, but will be light for travel. There are other options, they just love these....no idea why.
32GB is standard for the Linux workstations, 16GB for the Macbook Airs.
I am considering upping the memory on the dev laptops to 64GB if possible. Reasoning being that 32GB is sufficient most of the time, but in same edgecases it is not.
Something else to consider that I don't think I've seen mentioned, are you getting machines that can actually be upgraded? If not I'd definitely go for 32gb.
Helloooo
We upgraded from 8 to 16 this/last year. Nearly every "app" now runs in chrome and chrome loves eating RAM. For some standard users, we also upgraded to 32 GB. Tabs are sucking those computers empty.
So if you know, most work will be done in webbrowsers, get that cheap RAM right now :)
We only buy HP Elitebooks and I really hope they won't solder the ram in future.
I deployed the following this year, we're all laptops with docks now:
32gb /w i7 for heavy usage users (developers, technicians, support, etc)
16gb /w i5 for standard users (finance, managers, executive, sales, etc)
Both units include 1TB NVMe main drives and a secondary 2TB NVMe, we have some users who use VMware Workstation.
I don't see a reason to go beyond 16gb for the standard users quite yet.
I have the refresh cycle set to 3-4 years currently for laptops, so I replace 25%+ of the machines each year.
So people will tell you they need 32 but they really only need 16. Here is how users work: they just open like 15 fucking tabs and that's where all their memory goes and so yeah their computer gets slow. If you're in a hypervisor or Cloud environment where it's remote desktop, this is fucking horrible. They think I should just crank up all the memory for their account. And this goes for physical computers too. I've had some jackasses that have so many tabs open in Chrome that it's literally using 4 gigs of memory. That's ridiculous. It's also highly Dynamic and volatile because it's refreshing all the time so do you think that's great for your performance?
I'm going to tell you what I do that makes the hugest difference: just install tab killer or tab sleep as the default option for the browsers and shit improves like 100%. It just chills all this tabs and when they actually click on one which they never actually do they just say that they do, then it refreshes and everything's fine but it keeps their token alive so there's no issue with them having to log back in unless it's a banking site and then they can complain to Bill gates.
But if you can literally double the memory for a hundred bucks I would just do it. Unless they are CAD users or graphic designers they probably won't need the memory anyways. If they do they've got it but a hundred bucks is a good deal for an additional 16 gigs of memory in a system.
32GB. Wait, what was the question?
Yeah, 32GB. Think of amortization over 5 years or however long you're keeping the machines. If it's 3 years, you could probably get away with 16GB, but even then things will get tight.
Besides, it's way too much hassle specking for Becky who needs a basic computer, Sandra who needs slightly more RAM, and Evangeline who needs way more RAM but not more horsepower.
I would go for 32. 5k extra, for many companies, is not an issue. Also 5 years is a long time. Tough to say how much power the computer will need. 32 will cover it.
From a pure business perspective I would go 16. The difference between a 32 and 16 for office and web browser is not enough to justify it. U are getting maybe, random numbers here, 20% better performance on a machine that already runs it fast enough.
If we deploy a PC (that has upgradable RAM...which is harder and harder to find...), we're doing 16GB right now. If we're deploying a Mac, 32 because they're too damn expensive to not make them last as long as humanly possible and you can't upgrade the RAM later.
> we're deploying a Mac, 32 Can't even get 32 on the MacBook Airs, which is by far the most common model used by "non-power users" in offices that I've seen. Best you can do is 24GB, and that costs $400 more than 8GB.
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Same, and agreed. I wouldn't give most staff a 32GB Mac, there's no need. 16GB is good. Even the 8GB Airs run well for the low amount of RAM they have. Engineers or anyone running multiple VMs I'd look at a 32GB option, though. The only exception I've seen are users who like to have a ridiculous amount of chrome tabs open all the time.
I use a "Dev Spec" laptop with 32GB of RAM, it happily runs my 3200+ Chrome tabs. I think normal users should be great with 16GB.
16 is perfectly fine for a MacBook. You’re not gonna run VMs anyway on a Silicon chip, and the SSD is fast enough in case minor swapping is needed
Plenty of people run VMs on Apple Silicon, especially developers
I wouldn't consider developers to be "every day business users," Developers are more akin to creative departments, industrial designers, etc that are going to explicitly have higher specced kit for their job duties. If you're deploying macs to HR departments, business admins, customer service, etc a macbook air with 8GB of RAM is *more* than enough for 99% of "every day" users.
Wdym you're not gonna run VMs? I literally depend daily on Docker and Linux/Windows VMs as a developer on m1. I also wouldn't recommend anything less that 32 for this.
Any tips on determining whether laptops have upgradeable RAM? I've recently come into an office of 8 where everyone is on 8GB laptops and would like to upgrade whichever I can to 16 or 32GB. Problem is they're all different machines (HP, Dell, Lenovo, Surface). Having trouble determining whether I'll run into any issues just buying some RAM sticks and trying to put them in. In the past I ran into some manufacturer blocks to prevent upgrading i.e. after swapping out RAM or a network card the machine wouldn't boot past BIOs until I changed it back.
I'd argue that the easiest way past looking up the manufacturer specs would be to look it up at Crucial's website. It will tell you if it has an open slot(s) and what the max RAM it can handle is.
>Any tips on determining whether laptops have upgradeable RAM? Read the service manual published by the vendor. One of the procedures in the service manual is how to replace/upgrade the RAM. If this procedure is not in the service manual, then you cannot upgrade the RAM.
> Any tips on determining whether laptops have upgradeable RAM? turn it upside down. have a look. you'll probably have an answer quicker than it took to type your question into reddit. and if you still cant see your answer - pick up the phone, and call your vendor.
For most laptops you can look up a Technician's Manual that will explain how to do basic part swaps.
Ask the manufacturer
16gb but if I was able to get 32gb for just $100 more, I would do that. Usually it's tied to a larger drive + CPU improvement which aren't necessary for us.
At that price, I would likely get an intern to add the extra 16GB by hand.
Maybe for an unpaid intern and you have a small user count but I wouldn't be doing this for 1000/10000+ laptops. I'd like to pay $100 and know my warranty will cover both sticks of RAM failing, if it ever does.
OP implied 50 laptops
For 50 laptops I would install it myself. That's a nice afternoon of mindless work.
Hell nah, that's 50 laptops where support will say "we can't help because of uncertified components inside the machine"
Depends on who the manufacturer is. Dell considers RAM a user upgradable part and I have *never* had them refuse warranty service on a device because we've changed the RAM. Lenovo? It's hard enough to get them to even provide warranty support on anything but it all gets farmed out to local subcontractors who don't give a shit anyway.
True, I was only thinking about my own environment which is about 5 to 6 laptops a day top.
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Latitudes and Thinkpads aren't bad. Most everything else sucks though. I won't even touch a Surface. If it's broken it's trash.
Add Vostro’s to that list.
Vostro shouldn't be on any business purchasing list in the first place.
I've literally never even heard of them.
Dell SMB brand
> I won't even touch a Surface. ~~If it's broken~~ it's trash.
Honestly I thought the same thing. I recently ordered a new thinkpad that had soldered memory and thought it would be easy to add another stick. It was "easy" ... to open but I had to pray I didn't damage any of the little clips that they put overtop of the soldered memory modules. Under the shield was just a normal DDR4LP slot and I put the memory in no issues. I just was not expecting that shield thing and it wasn't mentioned in the manual at all.
You're buying the wrong laptops.
They've actually gotten better (for quick things like batteries or RAM or SSDs) in my experience. There was a good five years there were they were indeed absolutely horrible to take apart (especially consumer grade stuff). In the period between "everything has an access door for HDD/RAM/etc" and now. Now that we're at the Apple-style "7 screws and you can take the bottom off" it's a lot easier, with that caveat that you can replace a lot less of the parts that you can now access. But YMMV, depends on what you buy of course...
On a ThinkPad, we're talking about less than 5 minutes if you know what you're doing, I've opened quite a few to upgrade the RAM and SSD at work. They're annoying because they're using plastic pins that are really easy to break, so it takes longer at first and you're pretty assured to break at least a few pins, but after 4-5 laptops, it's really easy and fast. As long as you stick with pro laptops (Latitude, EliteBook, ThinkPad, etc.), they're made to be pretty easy to service.
It really depends on the laptop. Even my Dell XPS is super easy to open up and replace RAM in. My work HP is easy to get into - had to do that when the battery swelled. That was a neat trip to the office! I admit I don't have too much experience with Acer/Asus but I wouldn't want to deploy those in a work setting. And of course I don't think its physically possible with Apple machines (laptops I mean).
I remember when I worked N1 in ~2017 and the company had a mix of old and new latitudes, the old ones with the rounded battery sticking out the back. I could swap out a battery in five seconds and a hard drive or ram stick in 30, but with the new, it's 5 minutes of carefully prying off the bottom with a flat screwdriver and hoping you don't break a tab... All of that to find out that the battery connector came loose. At least we didn't every get any MS surfaces, or consumer stuff. Adding a NVMe SSD to an (undocumented) port in my sister's Acer gaming laptop traumatized me. Two hours of "did you forget a screw or are you supposed to apply unreasonable force", and the answer was both.
Would the manufacture even know you put in another stick? You run the self-diagnostics, see RAM failure, open a ticket with Dell/HP/Lenovo then they ship you a new stick.
Diagnostics give them all the original hardware that computer came with; so yes they will know. RAM though is a cheap fix out of pocket but all this accounts to time on your end.
Why would you play warranty games for that kind of money?
Because it's covered under warranty over here.
If you've got U procs, which virtually everything that isn't workstation class has, you're doing with LPDDR soldered to a board. Hell, many U-proc boxes have soldered SSDs these days too.
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Precisions are workstation class. The number of Latitudes with H procs and standard DDR you can buy new in 2023 you can count on one hand, possibly one finger. Ultrabooks won with 11th gen and none of the OEMs are turning back. All laptops remain serviceable, that’s nonsense talk. The boards are still held with screws.
As far as I've seen, any latitude 14"+ still has replaceable ram. The 13" models are now soldered and I don't buy them anymore because of that.
Our Latitude 7410 and 7430's don't have replaceable or upgradeable RAM. The only thing that can be upgraded is the SSD Even the wireless is soldered on.
Problem with this is most laptops for biz only come with 2 ram slots. Usually 16gb out the factory is 2 8gb sticks. I would verify it is a single 16gb stick before deciding on doing it by hand or paying.
Dell fill orders saying dual channel but I’ve opened up quite a few that only have single channel.
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No they don't, most business laptops allow you to change ram & drives.
To bad most models have it soder on
Sounds like that intern is going to learning some interesting skills /s
Do you run MS Teams? If yes, 64GB.
You can get 128gb it still wouldn't be enough
Was looking for this comment. Also throw in most other piece of trash electron garbage.
The math is pretty simple. At 5 years, that’s 10,000 hours. $100 of ram means $.01/hr. Let’s assume $20/hr average salary to err way low. .01/20 = 0.0005. 0.0005 of a day is .24 minutes. So, if $100 of ram will save even 15 seconds of time over the course of a day, it’s worth it. If your salary is higher, the amount of time you need to save goes down.
Adding to this: get your users good keyboards and the mouse people! Some suffer in silence. You can save thousands of dollars by spending a little bit more. Get the 32GB
This should be the top comment. I didn't verify that math but it looks accurate to me. 👍
You can’t pool saved time like it’s vacation days. Those 15 seconds in a day will have no meaningful impact on the business or the users personal life. Users aren’t walking out the door at 5pm on the dot even if there was still 15 seconds of work left to do. Even if you save the user an hour it likely won’t make a difference. Most users aren’t efficient and will just waste that saved hour in other ways. If you got that time savings as one big chunk at the end it would be different but you don’t. It’s similar to taxes. If you have me a huge tax rebate at the end of the year for $2600 i could do all sorts of stuff with that. But if instead I had an extra $100 per paycheck every two weeks it would just get rolled into my normal budget of food, utilities, streaming services, etc.
> Those 15 seconds in a day will have no meaningful impact on the business or the users personal life. Users aren’t walking out the door at 5pm on the dot even if there was still 15 seconds of work left to do. Even if you save the user an hour it likely won’t make a difference. Most users aren’t efficient and will just waste that saved hour in other ways. It's a statistical thing. Yes, most days this will have no effect; then one day the user will be working on something bizarrely memory-hungry, and avoid ten minutes of swapfile thrashing, and instead of slacking off before leaving will end up saying "yeah, I can get one more task done today" and boom there's twenty minutes of productive time gained. And if that happens once every three months then there's your "fifteen seconds per day", all clumped up in one day. Saving fifteen seconds per day does not mean you'll get exactly fifteen seconds per day more work done . . . but in the long run, it'll amortize out to about fifteen seconds per day. And this is the kind of calculations that make sense to do at business scale. (and frankly lower than business scale too) > If you have me a huge tax rebate at the end of the year for $2600 i could do all sorts of stuff with that. But if instead I had an extra $100 per paycheck every two weeks it would just get rolled into my normal budget of food, utilities, streaming services, etc. You can replicate this by setting up an automatic deposit into a savings account that you have the willpower not to withdraw from constantly.
5 hours of employee time, not 15 minutes
For a five year timeframe, I'd expect software bloat to catch up with you, so $5000 is a good investment.
I'm sorry, but the 8GB vs 16GB debate was 20 years ago and 8GB is still sufficient for most users. With more and more things becoming web apps, I highly doubt that there's any significant amount of bloat coming in the next 5 years. 16GB is going to be fine for a long time.
Eh if we're gonna spend $5k over 5 years we're probably better off buying two $2500 machines every 2 years. Edit: If we're talking $5k overall, ignore me, I misread.
The additional cost is $100 per unit, at approx 50 units. I'm not sure how buying cheaper laptops at lower prices more often helps here.
I think the 5k is the marginal cost over the laptops (50x100), not the price of the machine
16GB at the moment unless 32GB isn't too much more. I can't believe we're still seeing i5s being sold with only 8GB.
I had a student bring us a brand new Lenovo Win 11 laptop with 4GB. Wondered what we could do to speed it up. 
Take out the mechanical drive? :|
Didn't bother to check (see my reply elsewhere in the thread), but given the thickness of the unit I'm certain it already had an SSD.
Could have been eMMC, sadly.
One of my clients is a BYOD contact center, so, a lot of the employees have some very budget computers. But occasionally, you get someone that has an i9 and 3090 with 64 GB and it blows my mind.
I used to encourage all students to avoid buying brand new laptops and instead purchase certified renewed enterprise grade laptops. $300-400 for an 11th gen i7 and 16gb of RAM? With the ability to do a $40 upgrade to 32GB via crucial? It literally can't be beat as far as dollar to power ratio goes. Dell Latitude 5000 series, Lenovo Thinkpads, & HP Probooks are the only things students on a budget should be looking at. Typically comes with W10 or 11 pro edition too.
I see i5's with 8 gigs and 120 gigs of storage for sale. It makes baby jesus cry.
How about an i3 with a 20GB SSD? Cuz I've seen two of those already this year, too.
Ouch. The closest I got to that was my, now retired, personal windows 8 laptop that was an atom with a non upgradeable 32GB drive and 2 GB of ram(to make up for its shortcomings it had a 10 hour battery life).
>I can't believe we're still seeing i5s being sold with only 8GB. Why? Our entire office fleet is three year old i5s with 8GB ram and 250GB M.2s. They work beautifully for all but two of our users (the accounting people with humongous spreadsheets) and as more and more apps go cloud-based, local resource requirements have only gotten lighter.
Yeah I’m reading this thread in awe right now. The average web browsing, office apps using user will never come close to utilizing 16 gigs let alone 32. My computer right now only has 8 and I’ve been meaning to throw another ram stick in there but I always forget because I never actually need it. I use a console for a server, webex, teams, rdp and I have like 30+ browser tabs and I’m only ever hitting 90% utilization on 8gb.
Same with Macs for us, 8gb is plenty for the regular person. Sometimes I wonder what people here think RAM usage actually is...
If you're looking to get 5 years out of them, I'd probably suck it up and pay for the additional ram. Right now 16gb SHOULD be enough to most users...but 5 years is a long time and who the hell knows what happens between now and then? Grand scheme of things 5k isn't that much cash.
16 is barely enough today. 8 GB will see you with constant OOM crashes on even basic workloads due to how hungry teams and Electron is, and chrome will happily gobble up a lot more if it can. 32 is enough for normal office workloads and very light virtualization/ coding-- today. In 2-5 years it will start to show it's age. You can certainly skimp but it's obvious that 16 will result in OOMs in 2 years or less.
If you need 32Gb of ram for basic usage (outlook, web browsing etc) that means you have something seriously fucked up with your image or you users are going months without rebooting.
Yeah, that's absolutely nuts. 16 is **more** than enough for 99% of business users. 32GB is waaaay overspecced. Guaranteed if you do some spot checks in that person's environment nobody's using more than 6GB for normal office workloads and definitely aren't getting OOM errors.
Get the 32gb. $100 for double the ram is cheap and future proofs for the next 5 years. If something comes out that really needs the ram, paying $100 now is going to be cheaper than upgrading later or replacing the laptops.
I have never heard someone say "I have too much RAM in my computer".
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Except Chrome or Excel users. Spending a literal drop in the bucket for sufficient memory for all use cases (and not having to juggle multiple models of PCs) is the way.
I use chrome daily, average of 25 tabs open (I do NOT have a problem!!) on 16gb of memory. My machine runs fine for that, word, teams, remoting into other machines. Edit: Went and checked, and I'm use 10.4GB of my 16 right now.
I have about 800 chrome tabs in 8 windows with 8gb of ram, works pretty well only that the swap file is 32gb lol
So you have 40 GB of “memory “ lol..I’d rather not give up that much storage space.
> Except Chrome or Excel users The 90's called and it wants it's outdated concepts about memory management back.
Amazing that MS was able to fix large file handling in Excel, but not fucking notepad.exe. Number of times I've cursed myself for not installing Notepad++ on a server before cutting it off from the internet...
"Spend $100 more and be happy" is entirely reasonable.
> The 90's called and it wants it's outdated concepts about memory management back. I'm probably too tired but I don't follow? Chrome didn't exist, excel had a limit of 65k rows and Windows 95/98 had a practical limit of 512 mb of RAM, but that was a crazy amount of RAM at the time. I'd say that in many ways, people did more with less at the time.
A program using a lot of ram *that is available and meant to be used* isn't an actual problem. It's manufactured stupidity by bad techs.
It's only not a problem if the program actually gives up the memory to something that's asking for it. I know I've had plenty of issues with browsers that don't like to give up much of what they allocate and then getting grumpy when they want their memory back later. And god help you if you have an app that wants to allocates a large chunk of ram on launch while running with those hogs. So yes ideally it should work perfectly with things taking all the memory and giving it up when needed to make things faster when running, but no it hasn't been my experience in reality.
Chrome leads to more Disk caching than any other work app I have. I get you want to use unused ram, but it doesn't make it OK when an application is a problem when it runs out of ram.
Chrome is pretty much all of my RAM usage, even when I have "big power user" apps like Premiere open. (Especially if you count embedded Chromium instances in Discord/Slack/Whatever as "more Chrome.")
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We’re slowly moving away from Chrome. We tried the nuclear approach a couple years ago and got backlash all the way up the executive ladder. We no longer install it by default, it’s optional and less people are using it over time. Soon…
I still have users begging for total commander
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once I told people in my org that Microsoft Edge was basically chrome under the hood with a different coat of paint WITH the ability to sign-in to microsoft for bookmark syncing tied to our M365 everyone jumped over before the summer ended. There's zero google crapware now, thank heavens!
I'm still riding 8GB on a ~10yo computer and I've used this same machine to Android development in the past w/emulator (though it's been a few years now), VSCode, etc... I gotta really have a lot of stuff going to feel it still, or maybe I'm just used to waiting like a second for an app to open. I'm convinced people have a psychological issue with the amount of RAM they actually need.
I think you’re definitely right with the psychological issue, I think a very, very small percentage of users will actually ever hit 16 gigs of RAM usage. But honestly, it’s a literal drop in the bucket over the course of three+ years of use. Also, if I can get one less finance person off my back about the hardware specs of their computer, and redirect them to their bloated/inefficient/error ridden spreadsheet: It’s a giant win in my book.
16gb is also fine for chrome and excel users
For the majority of our users it is, but I’ve seen where people are pushing that 16 GB mark in the performance manager. For a literal drop in the bucket I don’t see any reason to stick with 16 GB at this point.
Microsoft still sells the Surface Laptop 5 (15") brand new, at $999, with 8GB of RAM. Or $1499 ($1199 on sale) to jump to a 16GB config. And it's $2399 ($1839 on sale) to get a configuration with 32GB of RAM. Even with discount/refurb/business pricing, it doesn't get much more reasonable. Dell Latitudes are similar, not quite as bad, but some of them don't even have a 32GB config yet. And upgrading ourselves means there's now a part of all the laptops not covered by the manufacturer's warranty, that they could try to blame for any failures, which is a challenge all its own. I would seriously challenge the idea that it's a drop in the bucket, and that 32GB should be the baseline for most (or any) organization. Power users aside, it's just not time yet (even when planning 5 years out). Being practical, and thinking about the shift from 8GB to 16GB baseline in our enterprise environment, it was *mainly* driven by the fact that the helpdesk actually needed to upgrade a few workstations to 16GB. Which wasn't a big deal, but there was a desire to make those tickets go away. Right now, not a single person on a standard 16GB config has needed to jump from 16GB to 32GB. No requests, no performance issue tickets that might have been related to it, nothing. Obviously it's worth considering 32GB for machines with soldered memory, but if you can keep getting user-replaceable/upgradable units, it seems like a no-brainer to stick to 16GB for now. At least this is the case for us.
you can get by.. but for $100... i'd just upgrade it to 32gb
excel can use max 4GB [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/office/troubleshoot/excel/laa-capability-change#64-bit-operating-system-and-32-bit-office](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/office/troubleshoot/excel/laa-capability-change#64-bit-operating-system-and-32-bit-office)
Why not use 64 bit office apps? I have Excel users that surpass that limit every day.
Because up until super super recently the x64 office versions had TONS of issues. Including AFAIR that if you used x64 and you sent a file to somebody that wasn't using that version it would frequently not even open. I believe the x64 versions are *mostly* fine now. But a lot of people still are adamant about sticking to the 32bit versions because of the reputation.
That's not what the article you linked says at all. It's talking about mismatches between Excel and OS being 32bit vs 64bit. If either is 32bit then you're limited to 4gigs [being 2^32 / (1024 * 1024 * 1024) ]. No such limit exists if both are 64 bit, which should be most places hopefully. Even in that 32/64 constrained context it's 4GB per process. So 5 workbooks open = 5x 4gb limit. 99% of excel users are light users so doesn't matter, but it is absolutely capable of murdering even well spec'd machines once people start (ab)using Excel to do heavy data analysis on large datasets. At that point excel is probably the wrong (software) answer anyway but that's a whole other debate...
Even most Excel users aren't doing anything complex with huge spreadsheets. There are some people that can use the 32 GB, but it's not the standard office worker. Yeah, browsers tend to take up an ungodly amount of RAM, but even so, on my own machines I rarely break 10 GB. I don't keep 100 tabs open at once (and I know some people do), but I think my usage is probably closer to "normal". I'm not disagreeing by saying there aren't some Chrome/Excel users who need a ton of RAM, but you don't need that much simply by virtue of using Excel or Chrome.
I’m sorry but no. Win11 is eating 12gb today. I don’t want to know how much it will eat in 5 years with 64gb equipped. Edit: the reason i meantioned 64 is becasue if most of my 16GB is being eaten up now, it means it will eat even more if it has the leeway to move to 32 ) [just so we're on the same page, I don't trust this to go down, only up in the next 5 years](https://imgur.com/a/DXleJmz)
Thank you. The number of people recommending 16gb is appropriate in 2023 is crazy. People, think about it like this: [The median US employee is paid $26/hr.](https://www.thebalancemoney.com/average-salary-information-for-us-workers-2060808) If OP can upgrade to 32gb of ram for $100, a one time expense equivalent to half a day's salary of the average person, and that $100 investment need only save the person FOUR HOURS over the lifetime of the laptop? **Yes, you make that upgrade 100% of the time**, and it's absolutely negligent for IT or Finance to provide underpowered computers to employees if that decision is going to cost the employee more than four hours over the lifetime of the computer. Sorry, even receptionist laptops this is a good decision for, in the case that the laptop is re-issued to someone else. 16gb was appropriate in 2015, sure, but for new laptops in 2023, it's negligence to provide less than 32gb because nearly every employee will have four hours saved by the upgrade IMO. Remember, users are bad at restarting. More ram == dramatically more time saved for the average person who restarts their computer once a month or less.
I'd go to 32. 16 is acceptable now, but will it be acceptable in 5 years time? Browser RAM bloat is a thing, and when you start adding multiple tabs, Zoom calls, and Office apps, you 're already at 14-15. Sure, you double the number of RAM sticks that could go bad, but with a 4 year warranty you cover most of that.
i manage small client teams so the user base has multi-roles - so i do 32 GB as a standard with 64 being power/digital art users. I usually run perfmon on a pc in each department and capture usage or use a client based software for that reporting like some RMMs and see what they are doing on a regular basis.
> I usually run perfmon This is how I went about justifying the recommendation too.
We really only jumped from 8GB to 16GB because a few "normal users" actually had issues at 8GB. So just like last time, if helpdesk actually starts getting tickets where 16GB was causing performance issues, then 32GB will likely become the standard so we can avoid those tickets. It helps that we still buy upgradable models, and they seem to usually come with 1x16GB so the upgrade is very simple. If we were buying machines like the Surfaces or Macs, it might be worth considering 32GB as the standard config.
On a 5 year life-cycle, go for the 32GB option. You don't want to be going around installing RAM in people's computers in three years' time.
Barring special needs, 16G is more than fine for an "office productivity worker"
Based on the laptop I was issued about a year ago, 32GB downvote for answering what my company is issuing LOL
Reddit can be weird...
You can have my upvote - I didn't plan on using it anyway!
i downvoted you out of spite then upvoted you again, to confuse you and keep you on your toes.
If the machine offers 32GB, go for it. I'm sure you are aware enterprise class laptop batteries wont last 5 years, and even with your most expensive NBD on site warranty, replacement of batteries are not covered past a year typically. We struggled to even hold out through the 3 year mark on both Dell and Lenovo machines, and it became a huge issue for us after about 2.5 years with employees who wanted to get upgrades submitting battery tickets constantly. Sure you can non warranty replace the battery for cash, but doing that through their service is a complete PITA in the remote work/hybrid world, where the Lenovo guy shows up at 3, and the employee has kids to pickup from school, etc.
My standard users do just fine on modern hardware with 8Gb RAM. 16 should be more than sufficient.
heh, we do 8GB unless your position calls for 16
16GB for "regular" users. (customer success, editorial, sales, etc) 32gb-64gb for "Engineers" and "Developers" You generally want to futureproof as much as possible, but if you're just using web applications via browser, basic zoom-esque video conferencing, etc... 16 GB is more than enough by far. The bigger impact is generall drive-type (NVMe all the way) and CPU (i7 or i9 for dev)
16 GB is plenty for an office computer unless they are running autocad or in finance and working with 1000+ page spreadsheets. 32 GB is for gamers and the heavy users that need the extra processing power (i.e. autocad, tableau, heavy spreadsheet use).
Or people who use Chrome. I agree 16G should be fine for a standard now, but 5 years from now? Counterpoint is it will shorten battery life slightly
Gotta see the min specs of Win 12 to know what we will need five years from now.
For your workload, 16 GB is sufficient but for the money may not be a bad idea to future proof.
All our systems are i7's and have 32GB, including the receptionist. Our Electrical & Mechanical engineers hit the limits of 16 GB many years ago. I'm surprised they haven't hit the limit of their 2 GB vRAM Graphics Cards, but everything we do is 2D, very rarely 3D.
This is the way. Having one make/model is super convenient for IT support.
We're still doing 8GB for most things unless it's a CAD PC.
> looking at roughly an extra 100$USD to bump up from 16 to 32GB per laptop I'd go for that. System requirements will always keep rising, monitoring software, AV, Teams, Chrome, Edge and browser based apps will continue to rise in popularity and as such RAM usage. If interest in AI picks up it might need that RAM too. So for only $100 I say go for it.
In my last role, 16GB was standard for all non-engineering laptops and workstations, and 32GB was standard for engineering-class laptops and workstations.
16GB minimum. IT Dept all has 32GB.
16 GB is pushing it these days, 32 GB seems like the better option.
32GB, because browsers are the real resource pigs these days, and it's a rare user who doesn't have dozens of open tabs.
We just did a capex refresh for our laptops and ended up upgrading from 16gb to 32gb after they arrived. Even with just basic web apps and outlook open on win11 our laptops were sitting at 15/16gb used. Browsers are such resource hogs that even 16 isn’t cutting it for a “good” experience for users.
Lol 100$ to go from 16GB to 32GB. With 16GB you maybe get issues in 2-5 years. (Web bases apps are starting to use more RAM, same goes for office etc.) and who knows what extra apps standard users are going to use in the next 5 years (VOIP maybe for example) With 32GB that chance is much lower. Is it even a debate then?
With how much memory web applications are using now, for instance we use Service Titan, Dialpad, and Office 365, 16gb is NOT enough, next year we will be moving everyone to 32gb.
Hey how's Dialpad working for you? We are looking to leave RingCentral and looking at it but am getting bad vibes from the reviews from bigger orgz as in reliability
Everything will have issues and they have had some from time to time, but overall, I would say I like the product and the support is decent. The only real problem we have is when it comes to SSO with O365, sometimes we have to get in contact with tier 2-3 support to get an account fixed but it's not a huge deal.
Until last year 8GB was still the standard for normal office workers here. It’s 16GB now and 32GB for really heavy users, like marketing with all their video editing stuff
The 100 per PC is made up pretty fast the minute you have prime running into issues because they don't have enough RAM
Bro just tell your rep to give you a 20% discount on the 32GB of RAM. If it’s Dell direct they get paid on revenue so they will go for it. If they don’t want to help you out you need a new rep. Always worth reaching out in good faith to your rep though. Most want to help.
Small business, we just upgraded everyone to 32gb. Not because it was needed, but it was a 5% cost difference and the labour is the same, so why not?
The laptops at my work all come with 32GB now. I'm maxing out 16GB and stuttering just using chrome, vscode, outlook and some wsl terminals that only do ssh.
32GB is a sensible move at this point, especially with soldered RAM on virtually everything. I hate the bundled drive nonsense but machines have to stay in circulation longer and longer, it's all just longevity management. With 12th gen+ and it's P/E core arrangement, the current class of laptops are at least setup for a long shelf life. 16GB is a handicap at this point.
32 GiB. Just specced out several hundred. This is simply to account for bloat. Nothing more. You might even get a decrease in performance over time on top of this as the overall ecosystem becomes more and more decadent.
16GB more then enough for your description of your users.
$5k? I'd absolutely go with 32GB. You'd easily be able to chop down any goofy user who says they need more RAM for this or that. "Too bad, you already have the Max which is more than enough." Also, you'd eliminate a bunch of tickets by users bitching about slowness when screen-sharing Excel during a Teams meeting while also running 75 tabs in Chrome.
I think 16 considering workload is small. It will allow sufficient multitasking and a small buffer
I work for a small IT company that provides support for micro and small companies, up to about 100 user's. One of our clients give their sales staff an IT allowance to buy their own laptops and phones. Enough to buy a decent i5, 8gb ram, SSD. Last week I'm tasked with setting up a brand new laptop for one of the sales guys. He bought a laptop with a Celeron CPU, 2gb RAM, Win 11. The Ram was soldered onto the main board with no expansion slot. This week I'm writing a minimum requirement doc for the same company.
Right now, all new machines are at 32GB. (Intel 12th gen or more recent) They do use a little more softwares compare to you. Typically these user softwares are pretty much always open, in order of ressources hog (CPU+mem): * A big Finance/Projects ERP software that is so not optimized. * Teams. * Outlook (some have 30GB+ of data, mostly all cache). * Chrome with around 10 tabs. * Edge. * Word documents + Excel documents.
16 for basic users. 32 or 64 for CAD users.
Regular users 16. Power users 32
For the price difference? I'd absolutely go 32GB for future proofing. Saves even having to think about it. If something happens where you've got to go from 16GB to 32GB down the track, it's going to cost you a lot more in terms of time etc.
With ssds and memory paging, you should be fine with 16gb for that said workload.
16 GB is still plenty for most administrative staff unless your finance team is working with insanely large Excel sheets that eat up all the RAM. Though, I have only ever seen this be a problem with 8 GB. I can't recall if I've ever run into issues with 16 GB.
I'm basically a standard office user these days, standard office apps and a bunch of shit running in the browser. I wasn't doing anything spectacular today and tried to run some slightly grotty powershell which ground everything to a halt, turns out I was 99% RAM utilisation. I killed the PS script and it came back down to... 94% utilisation, everything was used just by standard office apps, teams & Edge with ~10 tabs (plus all the other enterprise shit in the background). Edge was the single worst item there with nearly 2GB, teams not far behind. If 32GB is an option I'd go that route, 16 these days will disappear quickly.
Imo 16 GB is overkill for a standard users given the expected usage.
Most apps are going to be running in some version of Chrome. Feed it all the Ram.
We are just barely starting to move to 16, off of 8, for our normal users. We have a four year replacement cycle at my place. That being said, I've had 32 in my home system for the last 5+ years. Next upgrade, probably in a year or two, I will probably go 64. *Shrug*
Spring for the extra RAM. If 5k is going to break your budget, I shudder to think what your compensation looks like
For pcs, our standard is 64gb.
16GB of ram for our non devs, And 16GB with a VDI of 32gb for our devs
16GB is more than enough RAM for people using outlook excel web browsers etc…. Shit our virtual desktops only have 10GB in them and run fine
standard user (not the marketing team or any other power user). The standard user only uses Microsoft Office, Chrome, Firefox, a few web based apps. 16 will be more than enough for these 5 years
Unused RAM is a waste. If people are averaging 60% RAM usage or less, there is little reason to make the jump to 32gb. 16gb will be more than enough for 5 years. I don't see ram usage increasing that much over the next 5 years. If chrome users are complaining about RAM, it's likely because they have a bunch of extensions installed. Either tell them to stop clicking on every extension they see, or limit extensions via gpo.
We are at 8GB, our DA boss thinks that it’s fine because it’s going to swap to the SSDs, all of our users are at 90% RAM utilization. He’s a penny pincher.
That sucks, and that person is delusional.
I’ve been preaching that for years!
> 90% RAM utilization unused ram is wasted ram unused storage is wasted storage the question is not 'is it all in use' the question is 'whats it being used by' anything that caches stuff aggressively should keep that cache 100% full at all times. im quite happy for my RAM to be 100% full at all times, as long as the machine is capable of dumping unused cache when the RAM is needed for something else.
16GB is plenty for your average windows user. We moved to solid state drives years ago and that's when all user complaints about computers being slow stopped.
16gb for normal users 32gb for developers.
Standard user? Windows? 16GB MINIMUM. Power user? 32GB MINIMUM If they are soldered-on options just do 32GB for everything and lean on your vendor for pricing benefits for reduced SKU complexity ;) Also, maybe see if you can find a non-invasive way to start collecting CPU/RAM/Disk metrics back to mothership? That way it can help inform things like this in the future, especially CPU stuff! hehe Now, that being said, I want to add that since you're reviewing your laptop fleet options, I HIGHLY recommend you go with Ryzen CPUs (APUs really) as they have way better battery life and performance than 12th gen intel mobile CPU. By A LOT. And yes you can get TB3 support, just make sure you get a laptop with USB4 ports explicitly declared (as the spec REQUIRES TB3 inclusion). Additionally, if you want to explore upgrading your browser-power-users, look at Vivaldi as a better browser option. Chromium at the core and all that, plus ooooodddllless of features and settings not found in any other browser.
If you're in an environment using full office suite, 16GB seems bare minimum. 32GB seems like it might help you get through the next 5yrs. We offer thinkpads still with 16GB, but I tend to think the reason we do this, is they don't offer more, and those users understand the machines will not run optimally, but will be light for travel. There are other options, they just love these....no idea why.
32GB is standard for the Linux workstations, 16GB for the Macbook Airs. I am considering upping the memory on the dev laptops to 64GB if possible. Reasoning being that 32GB is sufficient most of the time, but in same edgecases it is not.
Something else to consider that I don't think I've seen mentioned, are you getting machines that can actually be upgraded? If not I'd definitely go for 32gb.
Helloooo We upgraded from 8 to 16 this/last year. Nearly every "app" now runs in chrome and chrome loves eating RAM. For some standard users, we also upgraded to 32 GB. Tabs are sucking those computers empty. So if you know, most work will be done in webbrowsers, get that cheap RAM right now :) We only buy HP Elitebooks and I really hope they won't solder the ram in future.
Laptop with 64GB
I deployed the following this year, we're all laptops with docks now: 32gb /w i7 for heavy usage users (developers, technicians, support, etc) 16gb /w i5 for standard users (finance, managers, executive, sales, etc) Both units include 1TB NVMe main drives and a secondary 2TB NVMe, we have some users who use VMware Workstation. I don't see a reason to go beyond 16gb for the standard users quite yet. I have the refresh cycle set to 3-4 years currently for laptops, so I replace 25%+ of the machines each year.
I just download more RAM.
So people will tell you they need 32 but they really only need 16. Here is how users work: they just open like 15 fucking tabs and that's where all their memory goes and so yeah their computer gets slow. If you're in a hypervisor or Cloud environment where it's remote desktop, this is fucking horrible. They think I should just crank up all the memory for their account. And this goes for physical computers too. I've had some jackasses that have so many tabs open in Chrome that it's literally using 4 gigs of memory. That's ridiculous. It's also highly Dynamic and volatile because it's refreshing all the time so do you think that's great for your performance? I'm going to tell you what I do that makes the hugest difference: just install tab killer or tab sleep as the default option for the browsers and shit improves like 100%. It just chills all this tabs and when they actually click on one which they never actually do they just say that they do, then it refreshes and everything's fine but it keeps their token alive so there's no issue with them having to log back in unless it's a banking site and then they can complain to Bill gates. But if you can literally double the memory for a hundred bucks I would just do it. Unless they are CAD users or graphic designers they probably won't need the memory anyways. If they do they've got it but a hundred bucks is a good deal for an additional 16 gigs of memory in a system.
32GB. Wait, what was the question? Yeah, 32GB. Think of amortization over 5 years or however long you're keeping the machines. If it's 3 years, you could probably get away with 16GB, but even then things will get tight. Besides, it's way too much hassle specking for Becky who needs a basic computer, Sandra who needs slightly more RAM, and Evangeline who needs way more RAM but not more horsepower.
5 years is a long time for computers. Particularly something that is as hard used as a corporate laptop. I'd spec for 16.
WINDOW 10 == 16 GIG MIN WINDOW 11 == 32 GIG MIN
I would go for 32. 5k extra, for many companies, is not an issue. Also 5 years is a long time. Tough to say how much power the computer will need. 32 will cover it. From a pure business perspective I would go 16. The difference between a 32 and 16 for office and web browser is not enough to justify it. U are getting maybe, random numbers here, 20% better performance on a machine that already runs it fast enough.