should i upgrade my ram or buy a new pc?

[carlosj3101]

So recently i decided to use Solidworks and Autodesk fusion 360 - which are 3D design and modeling software (for those who dont know), as well as using a 3D printing slicer called Cura
and my laptop became really slow in both every day tasks and espeacially slow when using these programs.
I've had it about 5 years and i bought it around October 2013
It runs fine although a little slow
when asking a friend who is into computers he suggested i upgrade my ram?
It currently has 8 GB of ram but says only 6.99 is available.
was looking into upgrading it to 16 GB
the model number is hp-p091sa
and its a 15.1 inch touchscreen with an AMD A8 processor?
and is currently running the latest windows 10.

Also if i should get a new computer can you offer some recommendations of what i should get?

Thanks

 

[JRock247]

I also use very similar software to you for my 3D printing.

I use SolidEdge (ST8), AutoCAD 2014 and Cura with my Ultimake 2+. I run all these programs on my HP ProBook laptop with no issues whatsoever. My laptop spec is not great but one key difference, is mine is Intel based CPU, not AMD.

My spec is Core i5 4310M, 8B DDR3 RAM with 256GB SSD.

If I have all 3 running with a fairly large drawing open in SolidEdge, I get a bit of a slow down but still very usable.

I am not a big fan of AMD CPU's (before Ryzen) and feel this is probably your bottleneck as apposed to your RAM. Intel CPU's (prior to Ryzen) are far superior to older AMD CPU's.

I would find a situation where your laptop slows down to an unusable state and check your performance (using task manager) and see what usage you get on your RAM and CPU and that will indicate what is your bottleneck.

Laptops can be upgraded to some extent, not 100% sure on yours but I have upgraded my CPU, RAM and storage on mine.

As said, check performance using Task Manager and this will give you more of an idea what is casing the slow down.