Hacker News Reader

I think this could have something do with 16GB dimms being a new thing and not supported by Intel on the laptop chipsets.

Lenovo has a similar problem in their new models. X240 has only one dimm slot and currently supports max 8GB of memory. While investigating the issue I found a discussion[1] where somebody mentioned that Intel would need to add support for these new dimms in the "memory reference code"[2].

[1] http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-m... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code

I solved that problem by not using Firefox. (And this is not intended to be snarky - Firefox was my preference, but under near-identical conditions, Firefox exhibited this problem while Safari did not.)

I agree 4 GB is getting to be a little low for a modern laptop, but I'm curious as to how bad this "chugging" is considering swapping to SSD isn't too bad and is many times faster than any swapping that occurred on those old 5400 RPM drives.