Will I perceive speed improvement with more RAM?
Upgrading RAM to improve performance?
Ultimately this comes down to what you are trying to use your Laptop for.
You have mentioned that you are working with virtual machines, so we'll use that as a starting point. You currently have 6GB RAM.
What will upgrading my RAM allow you to do?
- Allocate more memory to current VM's, requiring less writes to HDD
- Create more VM's, as there is more memory to allocate
- Allow the host (Your Laptop's OS) to keep more memory free, again requiring less writes to HDD
So, why is writing to HDD bad?
In short, it's not ... It's just slower (Debatable, but not with a laptop)
So what happens if you're still experiencing slow performance after the upgrade?
This will most likely be caused by your processor. You currently have an Intel Dual core processor, which with hyper-threading creates 4 virtual cores.
This means that you would realistically only be able to run 3 virtual machines simultaneously with relative ease.
On a last note, and possibly the most overlooked performance issue with laptops, is air flow. To put this into perspective, I can't play 'Heros of the storm' without performance lag. Once I put it on a laptop cooling base, it runs perfectly.
check the RAM usage when you do your normal work. Is your RAM nearly full and Windows pages memory out into the pagefile? If you can answer this with yes, you will benefit from upgrading the RAM. If you can never fill the RAM, you don't have any benefit and should look for a SSD to improve the boot and app start performance.