Wow. Remember using extended and expanded memory, and coping with 0.00064 gigs of ram on even the best PCs?
My first two programming jobs were on Radio Shack TRS80 computers with 0.000004 gigs of ram.
But I did just have to get my work laptop upgraded because it only had 16 gigs…
Hmm… is the pagefile enabled?
You could boot from a USB device (after putting Ubuntu Live or something else that’s free to download on it) and see if the glitches and problems persist. If not, there may be a problem with the installed operating system. If yes, then something else.
Before doing that, though, open up the Resource Monitor, and check your programs’ Working Set and Hard Faults. If the browser/Photoshop/whatever really uses 12 GB of RAM at once and you only have 8 installed, well, that’s a problem.
That would require removing the cover again, and removing the extra stick of RAM.
So far I have’t gotten a repeat of the fault.
It’s held on by about 17 small screws.
My first programming job (1981) was on Cado mini computers. 13mb and 26mb hard drives which were big, thick 13" platters. Programmed in a crippled form of basic in which the entire working storage was fixed in N0-N26 numeric fields, three 40-character text fields, six 20-character fields and X,Y and Z 256-byte buffers with two pointers. The Z buffer could be overwritten during program execution so was untrustworthy. Grand total working storage of under 2kb. And we did standard accounting packages and custom applications for our customers. 
So with computing of that era…was it worth it to customers? It’s hard to imagine what useful things you could do with such tiny capabilities. All I can think of is basic payroll - if you have a list of employee ID numbers, a list of pay rates, and some parameters for withholding and elections, you could use the computer to generate a simple form - where the computer just prints text to specific coordinates and the form is already labeled with the fields - of what the employee is being paid and where the rest of the money is going.
Then it could print that dollar amount onto checks, and sum the amount to be paid directly to the IRS and print a biweekly check for them, and print out some paper records to keep track of it all. Really limited.
No need to do that! 
You can always check the Resource Monitor, to get information on memory usage, though. I am curious what program has a 8+ GB working set.
I bought a new laptop recently that came with 8GB RAM and it works fine. Much better than my old one.
8GB of RAM is plenty for most people. You only need more for particular cases and you know if you do (CAD/CAM and/or video production mainly…a few other cases maybe).
If your laptop has a hard drive (not an SSD but mechanical hard drive) that is almost certainly where the problem lies. Laptop mechanical hard drives are sloooow. Painfully so. Just the nature of the beast and they slow everything down.
Bottom line is unless you have a need for the portability of a laptop avoid them like the plague. You are far better off with a desktop. You will get much better performance for a lot less money and get a lot more longevity out of it.
I think it sounds like something is faulty, rather than a simple resource or capacity issue - even with a spinning disk (and even a 5400 RPM one), switching windows shouldn’t be particularly sluggish. Something isn’t right.
Makes me wonder if the graphics card was supposed to be sharing a slice of that 8GB and maybe hogged all of it (leaving none for the OS and applications) or maybe the OS and GPU were in contention for the same memory resources - this could be misconfiguration of the graphics card, or a driver fault.
If the above was true, then adding another 8GB could indeed make all the difference, but it should have been possible to remedy at least partially without that extra RAM
It certainly sounds possible. The problem I was getting I couldn’t even google for.
I was using a 4k external display, something not officially supported with this laptop. (it just happens to work because they used chips for their USB-C solution that support thunderbolt)
What was happening was the mouse pointer was changing resolution and jumping down a few hundred pixels when loading a page in chrome or something else where the computer is busy.
Couldn’t find anyone else with this problem…but I had a hunch it was related to memory since it would happen in every program, but only once I was at 80% of RAM utilized per task manager.
My computer runs on 3 GBs of RAM, but upgrading to Win10 made everything too slow to be usable. But it was clearly a hard drive problem, as what was slow was stuff that involved the hard drive. Chrome was slow because every tab requires a new process, and the disk caching was apparently bad.
I have an SSD now, but Microsoft’s constant fumbling with updates and a lack of anything that actually needs the upgrade meant I just reinstalled Windows 7. The main effect is no more waiting for running programs to be switched back to memory. I was surprised at how fast I acclimated.
If you can get the ICQ number of the network card’s secure smtp web address, along with the screen resolution’s MAC address, there are several tools on-line that let you tweak the IPV6 settings of your memory stack to alleviate basic I/O write buffer spanning tree ospf loops.
I feel like I’m watching NCIS.
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That seems like a detail you probably should have mentioned at the start… did the problem manifest at all when that display was not connected? A 4K monitor will chew up a fair bit of VRAM even under normal circumstances.
Well, you could print out a table of some mathematical function. Say your business needed the 3/5 power of a number, to engineer your new product to each specific application. Creating a table of 1000 of these roots would be a huge project by hand, and likely to include errors too, but a pretty tiny computer could do it.
There’s a reason these machines were called “computers” back when they were getting started. Not that much of what most of them do today is very deep computation (as he hits the Submit Reply button).
I downloaded Process Explorer, much better than the Task Manager for finding out what is eating your RAM (so identifying bloat).
Actually there’s a few tools I have downloaded that I would not want to use a computer without now. For instance, “Everything” (a far better search tool).
Both great suggestions. If I have any more problems I’ll investigate with process explorer. And I already have “everything”. Gah the windows 10 search is so much worse than the windows 7 search.
I understood his question as asking whether 2 KB of memory was enough for a mainframe for a large business. The IBM 360/30 had 8-64 KB, but Wikipedia article suggests that a 360/91 with at least 256 KB but more commonly 512-1024 KB was used at “large installations” in 1967.