Is this normal for Windows 11??

Esotericnoob said:

Yeah, I'm looking for a upgrade. The store where I bought it wont upgrade it for me, so it's on my own risk. Why do they even sell laptops with 4GB ram, amazes me...

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Not trying to be funny but when you pay $500 dollars for a laptop today, its most likely going to be what you got - an i3 CPU and 4gig of RAM. Not saying that's definitely the issue, but those spec sure aren't screaming performance.... especially on Windows 11

That said, you still shouldn't be crashing all the time, so yeah, there's something going on as well. Personally, if this is a new machine, I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to fix it, I'd return it for something else. Preferably something with a bit more power.

And yeah, they really should stop pushing 4gig machines running Windows 10/11.

My two cents.

fruh said:

Independently from how much RAM you have, you have many background apps you can uninstall from your PC and run through the browser; disable all startup apps too. You don't need apps in the background if you don't use them :). Close Steam too if you are low on RAM and you aren't using it, toghether with probably most of your OEM apps. Also, the most important service to disable is Sysmain since it fills up your RAM for no reason

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This statement about Sysmain is just untrue, it neither 'fills up your RAM' nor uses it for 'no reason'.
Sysmain maintains a list of your most often used apps, measured over a period of time, and holds an image of the apps loader portion of code which is read into RAM to speed up the apps opening.
As such it is using some RAM for a very specific reason, and before people start with "yes, but, with an SSD it isn't needed", it depends on the situation, Intel's take is that the Sysmain service is different now than when it was first conceived and advise it is left on even with SSDs.
I can actually see the point with SSDs that do not have DRAM cache and beyond that there may be other situations where it could be of use.
The reason I suggested the OP disables it temporarily for testing was simply in case there was a corrupt image being pre loaded that was causing his issues.
Bree is right, this thread seems to have been a bit derailed from the original issue which was the OP's system crashing, as he put it "all the flipping time" into a thread about RAM upgrades. Although a RAM upgrade may help the OP to run more apps, open more tabs in browsers etc it may well not cure his original issue, hence the troubleshooting suggestions in my original answer to his post.

@Esotericnoob Also note that the specs say 2400MHz RAM but since you have a single RAM chip, you're effectively running at half that speed which is 1200MHz. That is how Dual Chanel RAM (DDR) works, it has to be in pairs to give you the full advertised speeds because it combines the speeds of both RAM chips into one giving you the advertised speeds so you never want to run a single RAM chip configuration. I know you bought it this way, but just saying by simply adding another identical RAM stick, not only are you increasing the RAM capacity but also the speed.

to verify what I am saying, download and run CPU-Z then go to the SPD tab and see the RAM speed. Notice in my example, it says 2400MHz although my RAM speed is actually 4800MHz but again, when running in Dual Channel mode, it 2x2400MHz = 4800 MHz speed effectively

Dru2 said:

Not trying to be funny but when you pay $500 dollars for a laptop today, its most likely going to be what you got - an i3 CPU and 4gig of RAM. Not saying that's definitely the issue, but those spec sure aren't screaming performance.... especially on Windows 11

That said, you still shouldn't be crashing all the time, so yeah, there's something going on as well. Personally, if this is a new machine, I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to fix it, I'd return it for something else. Preferably something with a bit more power.

And yeah, they really should stop pushing 4gig machines running Windows 10/11.

My two cents.

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That's a good point - maybe you should just return the laptop. If you take the back off to upgrade ram you have technically invalidated the warranty (if they can tell). If they will accept a return/refund or exchange then maybe go for the model up. But I think the model up is about £200 more (i5 and 8gb). i5 and 8gb runs extremely well. But ram sticks can cost £50 (or even £80 for an 8gb ram stick). So if you can afford it, it could be worth exchanging for the higher spec model.

However if it's too late to return or they won't accept return, only repair, it could be worth trying to upgrade the ram (and also maybe do a reset to factory settings) - after backing up your files.

DigitalGoat said:

This statement about Sysmain is just untrue, it neither 'fills up your RAM' nor uses it for 'no reason'.
Sysmain maintains a list of your most often used apps, measured over a period of time, and holds an image of the apps loader portion of code which is read into RAM to speed up the apps opening.
As such it is using some RAM for a very specific reason, and before people start with "yes, but, with an SSD it isn't needed", it depends on the situation, Intel's take is that the Sysmain service is different now than when it was first conceived and advise it is left on even with SSDs.

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Sysmain can be hurtful at best, its only perceivable effect is wildly increased boot times on HDD based machines since it takes up all the disk utilization at boot to load that list of apps, making the PC unusable even to just print a PDF document on the fly. Sysmain is not necessarily bad per se, it's just impressively badly thought out, also considered how bad Windows RAM management is. In my experience anyway :)