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I have no clue what RAM does, but I guess the more RAM there is the faster your computer XD. Did you type in 8 xD?

I'm contemplating getting a chromebook for portability purposes, but the lack of excel is a problem D:

11

The more RAM in your computer, the more stuff it can work on at the same time. It's not faster in and of itself, but when you run low it has to keep shuffling stuff around to work on something. And if it's spending time shuffling stuff around, it's not spending time doing what you asked it to do, which makes it feel sluggish and unresponsive.

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Ohh, okay thanks for the explanation! I'm not sure what shuffling stuff around means, but at least I have a better idea of why RAM's important.

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Potironette - what Coda said sums it up perfectly. my computer is very laggy, and it gets held up a lot while it's supposed to be loading in my webpages. my computer has the added feature of my screen dimming when it's getting stuck.

so if i get a computer that has more RAM than the one i have now, i can actually USE google docs without it getting hung up every. time. it saves my file.

as for chromebook and lack of Excel, i use the spreadsheets ('sheets') in google drive/docs for that too.

15

Using google docs without having the save thing sounds kind of dangerous D:.

I have to use excel to make graphs and find best-fit lines for school. I'm not sure google sheets provides best-fit lines, or if the online version of excel provides them either. Granted, it's not a huge inconvenience not to be able to do it since I could use the excel on other computers XD.

16

google docs saves your document every few moments. on my computers (home and work) everytime it saves, it gets hung up and i can't do anything for 1, 2, 5 minutes. *sigh*

i did a quickie search, and it looked like you can use Open Office on a chromebook... but i don't know all the details how to download everything to use it. i'm sure the spreadsheet part of Open Office can do graphs. i just don't. =)

17

-looks up open office- I didn't know this existed before :o

That's a lot of minutes '~'

18

minutes?

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1, 2, 5 minutes

did you mean seconds xD?

20

oh, those minutes. they could have easily been 1 or 2 minutes. when you're waiting for something, it always feels longer. it could only have been 30 seconds, but felt like 2 minutes.

21

That's true XD.

It's... POSSIBLE... but it's a pain in the butt and involves switching your Chromebook into dev mode, which requires powerwashing it and causes some annoyances. (I'm doing this on my own Chromebook because I actually use dev mode for development. For me, the annoyances are worth it.) It's also not a very good experience because it doesn't integrate natively so its graphical rendering can possibly be sluggish.

Have you tried running Google Docs in offline mode so it doesn't save to the Internet?

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i don't have a chromebook... yet. my current slow home computer is an hp tower that runs Ubuntu 14.04. my slow work computer is also an hp that still runs WinXP. the only time i use google docs this intensely is during NaNo, so that i actually notice the laggyness of my computer. haven't tried running google docs offline - i usually keep it online because i always share the link, and usually i can tell when people are in the story reading it. XD

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Oh. If you get a Chromebook you probably won't HAVE that lag problem, then, even if you get one of the 2GB ones. Chromebooks are optimized for running Chrome apps and the underlying OS is a lot leaner.

25

exactly why i want to get a chromebook. =D