Calling all Computer Geeks!;)

[hhw]

Figured as much about the RAM!

I'll keep that in mind about not running a second antivirus, I thought that would be a bad idea when I read to remove any preexisting antivirus before installing the AVG.

Ignore what others have said about RAM, as they seem to be basing their opinion on limited anecdotal evidence, and not on any understanding of computer architecture. RAM is not only the most common bottleneck in a computer, but it can also be used in flexible ways that work around bottlenecks with other components i.e. frequently accessed files can be cached in RAM avoiding the need to go to disk which is hundreds of times slower. This is why RAM is referred to as primary storage, while hard drives and ssd's are secondary storage. RAM can also reduce CPU consumption by caching the results of compute heavy work, such as database queries which are now common in desktop environments as many applications include embedded databases.

Modern operating systems, and Windows especially, as well as web browsers the way they have evolved for the modern web, are also very RAM hungry, using a few GB's each at times, and I would advise a minimum of 8GB of RAM these days for casual users, and 16GB for power users.

For casual use, especially on a laptop, disk is actually less important as you're not crunching a lot of data. For the most part, you're just loading applications from disk into RAM. Once you have the applications already running, disk doesn't really matter much. If you don't have enough RAM though, your OS will try to create virtual memory on hard disk, which will not only make your applications slow as they have to page data in and out of RAM over to disk, but these operations will also use up a lot of disk operations, slowing down all other disk activity as well.

Replacing your hard disk with an SSD will also require either migrating your filesystem over as is, or reloading the OS from factory state requiring you to reinstall everything. Some laptop manufacturers also put some restrictions in their BIOS to restrict to models of components that only they sell. This is much more likely to happen with a disk drive than a RAM component.