Not everyone, in fact
few people, can afford to just double their ram. This is especially true in a laptop.
So the solution to needing more available ram, rather than throwing more money at the problem, is to run the PC smarter.
And that involves shutting down all those Redundant Services, and TSR's that just churn away in the background and eat up not only ram but CPU time as well. That's been well documented on many Internet Forums. And clean up the mess on the hard drive. Get rid of all those temp files and old programs that you never use and then Defrag it!
I've tuned up PC's that are several years old, and have never had professional care. They are running very slow, and even lock up occasionally.
They suffer greatly from Software Overload, and HD corruption, like way too many temp files and horrible fragmentation.
Removing over 100,000 garbage files from a hard drive, is nothing new, it's just par for the course. Likewise, cleaning out the bad entries in a Registry, can reduce it's size in memory by 30% or more. The registry is one thing that must load into ram every time you boot up your PC, so it's beneficial to keep it as small as possible.
After I've cleaned up and tweaked the PC for optimum performance, I often get a comment from the PC's owner, like, "WOW! It never ran that fast when it was brand New!". "I know. It's what I've been doing for 36 years". And, I never add more ram. I'd rather optimize the PC to use what it has.
Aside from that, I can certainly testify that upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to an
SSD, can greatly Boost a PC's performance.
For several years, I've avoided getting an SSD, waiting for the technology to be perfected and the cost to come down.
Currently I have SSD's in both my main PC and my backup PC. In both, I have Windows 8.1/Pro/x86, and just 4GB of ram. And both PC's are lightning fast! But, I perform some maintenance daily, and some weekly, but never 'weakly'.
Good Luck and Happy Computing!
TechnoMage