HP Stream 7

[lhauser]

Seems a little quiet in here... <knock knock> Anyone home?

Anyway, in addition to my Surface, I have an HP Stream 7 I bought a few weeks ago. It kept calling, and at under $100 (with free next day delivery) I gave in.

I added a 64GB SD card to it and updated it to Windows 10 and find it surprisingly usable. I'm amazed that Win10 runs so well in 1 GB of RAM! The only thing that bugs me is, after the Win10 upgrade, the on-screen split keyboard is only usable during login...afterward, it's greyed out.

 

[GreyFox7]

Wow only 1GB of RAM eh, that must be the reason there's no room for the onscreen keyboard.
I assume this is not upgradeable either.
so... what are you numbers in Task Manager and Resource Monitor for Memory? I'm very curious how this shoehorns into a gig of ram.

 

[lhauser]

After installing 10532, immediately after a reboot Task Manager shows I'm using around 67% of available memory, Resource Monitor shows about the same. Since my heaviest uses are typically Chrome and Word, the amount of free RAM is reasonable, as long as I don't open too many tabs or documents.

 

[GreyFox7]

I should have listed the Task Manager specifics. For example on my 4gb device

In use: 2.4GB
Available 1.5 gb
Committed 3.0/5.2 gb
Cached 1.4gb
Paged pool 3.4mb
Non paged pool 118mb

 

[lhauser]

Hmm, of course you'd want that level of detail.

In Use: 567MB
Available: 380 MB
Committed: 1.0/2.7GB
Cached: 328MB
Paged Pool: 140MB
Non-Paged Pool: 172MB

Hardware reserved: 72.6MB

And of course these numbers shift as I'm writing them down.

You're right, the memory is not expandable. It's an intentionally cheap tablet: 1GB memory, single band Wifi, quad-core Atom processor, 32GB SSD (expandable with SD card), no video out, less-than-stellar battery, and had Windows 8.1 with Bing (which is free to OEMs) when I bought it. But I feel like every review I read before I spent $100 on it was right...it's a surprisingly usable little tablet, if you don't push it too far or expect too much speed.

 

[GreyFox7]

Not too bad although I don't know what you were doing... but with 1gb committed, 570 in use, 380 available it's not hitting the swapfile too hard and swap is on eMMC so speedier than an old HD.
I used to run lab servers on desktops with 768MB RAM with 2 VMs each with 256MB. 3 servers per desktop box. yeah they were a little sluggish at times... but use could test stuff with it.

it was a godsend when we got an extra 256 on them for a full 1GB ram and bumped the VMs up to 384MB.

 

[lhauser]

That was right after boot; only the Realtek audio manager and Intel DPTF LPM Service Helper running in startup. I haven't messed with turning off any services, so it's pretty much Windows 10 out of the box.

 

[GreyFox7]

According to my research the Stream 7 has 32 bit OS.
I think it's fair to say 1gb is the bare minimum 2gb would be better (and probably min for 64bit OS), 4 gb sweet, 8gb according to a recent paper I read is all that's ever needed for 90% of all users. For more than 8gb you need to be running multiple VMs or some other very memory intensive workload.

 

[lhauser]

Yes, it is a 32 bit OS. 2GB would certainly be better (think Surface 3). I'm perfectly happy with the 4GB on my i5 SP3...I've never run into any performance issues. I have 8GB in my Lenovo laptop, and have never come close to needing it (though it would be handy for some VMs, for sure). It helps that Microsoft was worked on making Windows more efficient over the last few versions, and memory needs have stabilized at a reasonable level.

 

[toffie]

May be this might fix your issue. Click on Keyboard & Input Methods > Default > Choose Input Method > Hardware, Physical Keyboard > Off to restore the on-screen keyboard. If it does not useful then check Hp Stream 7 Tablet Manual for more methods or ask HP community for help.