Since I was so happy with the HP 650 business laptop that I got for my wife, my father in law decided to get one too.

I was surprised to find that the Windows Experience Index (WEI) was so much slower than I’d seen on my wife’s machine:

It’s no surprise that the memory benchmark is down, as I expect that a second DIMM improves overall system bandwidth, but it seems that 2D graphics are also affected. I suggested that he got another 4GB PC12800 SODIMM. It worked:

So it looks like even if you’re not using memory intensive apps then overall system performance can be improved by adding extra RAM.

I wonder if performance would be the same with 2x2GB, and whether this applies to all systems with Intel integrated graphics?