Question External hardware to boost minimum requirements

[cjc16]

Hello, I want to start this off by saying that I'm relatively unfamiliar with pc gaming, so please excuse my ignorance if the rest of this thread doesn't make total sense.

I recently downloaded a game (FIFA20) onto a spare laptop at my house for my son to play while in lockdown. Seemed to be more practical than buying an entire xbox or playstation. However, this backfired once I realized that the hardware (Windows Surface Laptop; 5.04GB RAM available; 9.18GB storage available) wasn't nearly enough to meet the system requirements for the game (8GB RAM; 50GB storage).

Based off of my cursory research, I don't think you can add RAM to Windows Surface Laptops. Are there any sort of external pieces of hardware which would augment my current system's RAM and storage (allowing the game to be played)? Or would something like this end up costing more than the xbox or playstation I was hoping to avoid buying in the first place? Appreciate the help!

 

[Inspireless Llama]

I'm not 100% convinced this works, but if the laptop has USB ports left, you could add an external HDD for storage.

It won't help much with performance, but you possibly could increase the amount of virtual RAM is being used. I'm really not sure about this but it's entirely possible that Fifa will do fine on the amount of RAM that's currently available, but it probably will affect performance. But so will increasing virtual RAM.

Virtual RAM basically means that you're using a part of your hardrive as (extra) RAM. The issue with it would be that it also runs at the speed of your harddrive, which is much slower than actual RAM.

 

[cjc16]

Llama - thank you so much for your suggestion. I hooked up an external HDD and it worked like a charm.