How Many GB Should A Laptop Have?

A Microsoft Surface.


A Microsoft Surface.

Wondering how much GB of RAM or SSD storage your laptop needs is an important first step in buying a new laptop.

In the current market, there are countless laptops available for your every need. Whether you need a great gaming laptop or a laptop for studying on, there's likely a laptop out there for you.

However, there are some basics that every laptop should aspire towards. These include certain storage and memory capacities. Here's how many GB you should look for in a laptop.

How Many GB of RAM Should a Laptop Have?

When it comes to RAM, you should really aim to buy a laptop with at least 8GB.

Having more RAM allows for more applications to be stored in the faster, short-term memory. This grants you a faster, more responsive laptop that can have more tabs and applications open at once.

4GB may be enough for the basics, but if you're wanting to get the most out of your laptop without limiting yourself, 8GB of RAM is better than 4GB.

Even for browsing the web or watching YouTube, having the option to keep more applications and tabs open with 8GB RAM is worth the price difference. While 8GB options are more expensive, some great budget laptops do offer 8GB.

It's also worth noting that 8GB of RAM is the minimum for some PC games.

If you want to play the likes of Call of Duty: Warzone, or Microsoft Flight Simulator on your laptop, 8GB is the recommended minimum spec.

How Many GB of SSD Storage Should a Laptop Have?

Looking at the minimums, 128GB is the lowest amount of SSD storage you should opt for in your new laptop.

SSD storage has many benefits over the traditional HDD. This includes being able to read data (and thus open applications) much quicker than its storage counterpart.

128GB should allow you space for all your everyday applications, software, and files, especially given the online world we now live in.

With Netflix and YouTube, you no longer need to download videos. With Google Drive and other cloud storage products, not all your files need to be on your device.

Again, if you're wanting to use your laptops to play games, you might want to consider a 256GB SSD laptop. A 256GB SSD will grant you super-fast loading times on these games. Alternatively, you could opt for one of the best external SSDs.

However, this will lead to more costs and, with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate offering cloud streaming on these devices, could be overkill.

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