Survey: PC repair confidence often outweighs ability

[iranu]

Shove 4Gb of ram into a PC for pennies and 99.99% of all "insufficient memory" problems are solved because 4Gb is more than enough for most users. 8Gb and above are really only needed for gamers and specialists - who know what they want and spec the machine for their purpose anyway.

Who specs PCs with less than 4Gb ram nowadays?

[bledd]

Well it is a software issue, there's too much running

[KeyboardDemon]

You mean the machine going into violent swap? If they mentioned that the hard disk light was solidly lit then it could be a clear & easy diagnosis, but without the original questions we just can't know.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about paging, swapping or whatever the proper name is, the most noticeable result for end users is that momentary freeze or lockup while the data is swapped around.

I find though that 90% of problems are actually malware and no amount of memory will stop that. You would be surprised at how much crappy malware can slow a system and cause instability. I call this article BS as it seems this time they are trying to get you to buy more ram from them.

I'm not surprised at all, but then I tend to be the person in my family that gets the call to say that someone's PC has been locked by the Metropolitan Police or they have been surfing the net and a site they were on has scanned their PC and found thousands of errors, should they buy the software that will clean their system!

[RobbieRoy]

The survey sample asked "1,001 adults aged 35-70 about their ownership of personal computers (PCs), with a focus on purchasing memory for their PC" and was also structured to be neutral with gender balance aspects addressed etc. It also didn't get close to the 2,000 respondents that would make the results statistically robust.

Consequently, its likely that it questioned a lot of people who said "yes, I've got a PC and feel I know a bit about its RAM", rather than actually selecting them for people who would know the significance of RAM in a struggling set up.

The result, then, is perhaps not a surprise and just a bit of marketing - like those silly 'surveys' that Steve Wright in the Afternoon on Radio 2 (which I don't know listen to any more) mentions saying things like "men are not good at asking women out, so says a survey, blah, blah, blah".

[Domestic_Ginger]

Makesvme think of the onion article; 'My Computer Totally Hates Me!'

[kobolds]

The reason why no one will think the problem is cause by lack of memory is because these days PC come with RAM minimum 4GB or higher which is more than the OS required .

[Ttaskmaster]

The reason why no one will think the problem is cause by lack of memory is because these days PC come with RAM minimum 4GB or higher which is more than the OS required .

I find it tends to be the amount of crap they install that they neither properly uninstall, nor realise they can remove from startup... which may well take up a lot of RAM.

[DavyJ]

They didn't have to do a survey. They could've just gone to Newegg and looked at the reviews. It's amazing how many people rate their tech-level high, and then leave poor reviews because it's obvious they don't know what they are doing or how the technology they bought or computers work.

[abaxas]

Over the years I can categorically say the largest killer of PCs is....

Installing MS updates.

[tomthum]

a company that sells memory comes to the conclusion that more memory solves everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ttaskmaster]

But... pritty pritty lights!!

[Mentawl]

Funny how a company that sells memory comes to the conclusion that more memory solves everything.

Yeah, rather convenient that.

[KeyboardDemon]

Of those 1001 people I wonder how many ended up buying RAM that they didn't really need?

Also I think if we changed the title of this thread it would be true of most things, ie

Survey: BF4 players confidence often outweighs ability

Survey: Photoshop users confidence often outweighs ability

etc...

Or maybe it would only apply to me, however if we draw on Parito's law where 80% of users make use of only 20% of the features then I think it makes my assumption carry a bit more weight.