8GB vs 16GB RAM: 16GB is worth it for heavy multitasking

If you regularly have dozens of browser tabs open alongside Word, Excel, and a PDF reader, 8GB is your bottleneck — Chrome alone can eat 4–6GB. Doubling to 16GB gives you headroom so the system doesn’t swap memory to your hard drive, eliminating stuttering and lag. The upgrade is cheap (used DDR3 sticks are a few bucks on eBay), making it the best performance-per-dollar upgrade for that PC. If you only have 4–5 tabs and one Office doc, 8GB is fine.