I have noted that some laptops with otherwise decent specs are built with only 8gb of soldered ram. Considering the advancement in the speed of available ports on modern machines, are there hardware or software solutions that diminish the handicap of too little memory on an otherwise siutable laptop?
Sure, just solder on better RAMâŚcue âSkill Issueâ joke. There are (seemingly) plenty of people these days with the tools and skills to do such crazy stuff. If youâre not and thatâs why youâre asking then just keep model hunting. There is always SSD scratch disks but itâs not as good as good 'ol volatile memâŚ(and you didnât say if said models had open m.2 slots etc.) Unless youâre a gagillionaire and can afford the fanciest of fancy SSDâsâŚin which case why bother with a laptop with soldered memory. 
That said use case might help. I mean I have lots of netbooks/laptops with as low as 512GB of RAM doing what they do because thatâs fine for their use case. i.e. Why is 8GB such an issue for you?
Iâm guessing your stuck in some inbetween land where to get what you want/need the only models have a billion things you donât want and the price to match and the stuff that is more reasonable has this one issueâŚif you have time, wait for model changes and the âcool at the moment trendsâ they bring that might better suit your needs.
more RAM needs more power and costs more. So they can save 10 bucks on DRAM and advertise higher battery life in the process. And they can get an upsell for the16GB version for +300 bucks because people canât get cheap SO-DIMMs and buy that upgrade elsewhere. Win-Win-Win situation for the company.
Just get a laptop with non-soldered memory. My laptop (Tuxedo) has two slots for SO-DIMM (up to 64GB), but there are plenty of laptops where at least one slot is upgradable. I remember Lenovo having several models where 8GB is soldered and there is an empty slot for a 2nd SO-DIMM.
But my market research is 2 years old at this point, so I canât be helpful with present models and practices.
The hardware solution to more RAM is more RAM.
Software-wise there always was âsomethingâ, most famously the swap (file), which still is the go-to software solution when you run out of memory.
But there is also memory compression, but this usually only works when at full RAM and uses quite a bit of CPU, so is just more power draw for a laptop.
And starting to compress stuff when you are out of memory / face memory pressure is basically the worst time to put additional load onto a system.
TLDR; not really. Buy a proper Laptop with SO-DIMM slot and put a cheap 16-32GB stick there, done. RAM for days.
edit: I use ZFS on my laptop and this optimizes my RAM when it comes to read cache quite a bit (also great for writes by keeping the SSD in deep sleep mode). So you can relatively comfortably use ZFS to get way more mileage out of your filesystem read cache. I sometimes have 15GB of application data and 50GB of filesystem cache in my 32GB Laptop and the SSD only ever wakes up once every 2 minutes to write stuff for a second to then go back to 50mW. ARC is amazing on a laptop.
Obviously doesnât help with application memory usageâŚbut I donât think compressing running code does anyone any good, especially not when we are talking about 10-20 bucks worth of DRAM to avoid all of that mess.
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I feel this discussion is not complete without a âGo back to the Win95/98 days and âDownload some RAMââ jokeâŚ
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DRAM was really expensive âback in the daysâ. A lot of scammer software was made in this time that didnât do shit. And we all learned that there is no substitute to actual RAM, there is no cheat code. You can run swap on an Optane or NAND now, but thatâs really the best case for âout of RAMâ to avoid your processes being killed. Might as well buy DRAM instead of Optane/NAND in the first place.
Today we have hardware manufacturers purposely selling machines with too little RAM so people pay extortion prices on upgrades or incentivize to buy a new laptop after a year or two (because needs more RAM) while memory today is dirt cheap (unless you need to buy 12x DDR5 RDIMMs for a server).
And with even 64GB SO-DIMMs aroundâŚthe stuff is just sitting on a shelf, waiting to be plugged in. People payed more for RAM compression/optimization software in the 90s than we do now for actual RAM 
I got 32GB on my laptop and although I occasionally ran deep into swap (64GB of swap on the SSD), itâs still fine for me all things considered. Donât buy for rare peaks, swap is mostly fine there. Certainly doesnât justify the price for higher capacity replacement.
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I have the following quote to offer. Although, I donât know if the attribution is correct.
âMemory is like an orgasm. Itâs a lot better if you donât have to fake it.â
â Seymour Cray, on virtual memory.
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Both are great by themselves and worth remembering. So fits nicely imo even if not accurate.
And with my academic background I can sayâŚwe all run von Neumann machines today. And that is CPU+memory and everything else is considered periphery. So get your foundation right and build a great machine on top of it, not the other way around.
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zram / memory compression
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If limited then the best option I would do is learn Ntlite and maximize the amount you already have. Windows 11 can use up to 3 gigs just on vanilla but with Ntlite and some work you can get it down to 1.4-1.5gigs of usage. Even lower then that but you may lose some things you might truely need for a laptop.
I still run 8gigs and only had one issue with one game(even then I donât play any high end ones)
Well awareâŚ
Fitting but not. Which is to say itâs accurate but more the OP question seems like heâs probing for some snake oil solution Like back in the day when shady BS programs promised you to âDownload more RAM.â
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Yeah or just not run Bloat-ee-ohsâŚI mean Windows.
That said no OS or use case was mentioned. Iâve been seeing a lot of posts on here lately where a question is asked with very little details. Then everyone spitballs because we donât really have enough info to say anything worth whileâŚitâs almost like a coordinated ML/Scrape attempt to flush out writing styles, pedanticism and anything else that might be valuable to scrape.
Hey guysâŚI need help choosing. Either Purple or Pizza. (Cue 600 people saying Pizza is better and 4 or 5 asking what the hell that means.) (Cue arguments over clearly itâs something food related vs no itâs purple or pizza print underwear duh!)
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We can give options till we narrow down whatâs what. There is nothing wrong with that and shows as a community here we help the best we can with what we got
@jazzisjazz Look for reviews for laptops that actually show teardowns so that you know whether or not the ram is soldered or replaceable. Thatâs the only good advice to keep in mind for future purchases.
If youâre out of the warranty period, then mod the shit out of it. 
@Exard3k is also right and already conveyed what I said, so this comment is pointless. 
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As an owner of one of those 8 GB soldered-down laptops (a Win 10 machine, which is now long semi-retired) , I have explored this a bit myself. Short of some serious soldering wizardry ( which I donât possess), the only alternatives are (were): a. switch to a much less memory-hungry OS like Linux or b. reduce the memory footprint of Windows with various tools and some edits to the Registry. I went with option B, as I wanted to have some applications on that machine so I can use it as a backup laptop in a pinch. Slimming down Windows and reducing background services to the absolute minimum helped at least somewhat.
Overall, not the most satisfactory outcome, but itâs workable.
Also, if you can upgrade the SSD in your 8 GB laptop to something a bit faster (and with more capacity), itâll help considerably with how responsive the laptop is and feels.
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Some have a second slot so you can upgrade. Keep in mind any additional RAM beyond 8 GB will run in single channel mode in this instance. Other than that I only have one bit of advice: Donât buy it. Soldered RAM should be illegal as far as Iâm concerned.
Yep, this ^.
If itâs running Linux, zram with zstd can do amazing things. Itâll basically make the system act like it has 20-24 GB RAM instead of 8 with a negligible performance hit. Compressing to ram with a modern CPU or even something like a RPi (I use it on my VisionFive 2) is orders of magnitude faster than swapping.
I wonder if one of those 16gb optane nvme would work for swap, they have far lower latency than flash. you can pick them up for ÂŁ3.
Yet another âoh I found that cheap Optane, so must be goodâ. No, very first gen Optane was good 10 years ago. Today, even the cheapest NVMe are faster and even HDDs are faster on sequential writes btw.
And wasting your only storage slot on 16GB is another matter. Especially if that M10 is slowing everything down, which it certainly will.
Because it is trash.
If you really want to use an SSD for swap with good performance, use M.2 enterprise drives. Benefit is they donât throttle on writes like consumer drives (swap is write-heavy). But all M.2 use a lot of power, especially on load. You certainly donât want something with 5-10W power draining your battery.
Get a proper laptop
i never said anything about sequential performance, i said latency. since the other options consisted of elaborate ways of downloading more ram or soldering new chips. optane is about the only plug and play solution was actually used as ram that could actually plug into a laptopâŚ