How to speed up machine on virtual memory?

I'm currently waiting for my Vaio Z to arrive, but I’m having some 2nd through about it as the machine will “only” have 4GB of RAM.

I’ve removed a RAM module from my current ThinkPad to reduce the RAM to 4GB in order to see how the machine runs on virtual memory.

Despite the ThinkPad have an ssd and virtual memory set to 8GB, I was not able to play a 360p YouTube video smoothly in Firefox when the RAM is full.

So does anybody have any ideas on have to speed up a machine when the RAM is low?

Many thanks

P.S. 4GB of RAM is fine for my needs, but I just want to make sure on the rare low memory occasions, the machine will not slow down too much.

 

Video is resource intensive, especially when combined with streaming which buffers into memory - probably the "perfect storm" situation of nailing RAM. To be honest, the solution is to close down some of the items hogging your RAM. For example, Firefox takes up a lot of resource, which unfortunately seems to be the same for Chrome, Chromium, IE and Opera, not to mention webpages are a lot bigger and busier these days, full of images, flash, advertising videos, javascript and so on, all using resources, and multiplied up per tab open.

As you acknowledge, 4GB is usually plenty, but I'd always slim down your install as much as possible. Remove any software not needed - Sony has a habit of loading all sorts of bloatware on their machines, so clear as much of that as possible, or else set them to not run continuously. Do some research and see if any software can be replaced by a less resource hungry alternative, for example, NOD32 from Eset has always had a good reputation for being a low footprint anti malware solution, whereas Norton has traditionally been fat and heavy. And if you do run into situations when things are slowing, see what's going on and react appropriately.

None of this is Sony specific - it's just common sense when using computers!