How big of a difference is 8gb and 16gb of ram in a laptop with an i7 processor? Is it worth an extra $80?

Totally depends on what yo use your computer for. The vast majority of people do not need more than 8G.

Depends what you are doing.

If you are just web surfing, running office and playing games, you wont notice much improvement, because the extra memory wont be used.

It's when you start running large and complex tasks, like rendering 3D movies, large engineering calculations etc with programs that need (or at least can make use of) that extra memory, that you get some advantage.

Personally I'd buy the machine with 8gb, and make sure it has a free memory expansion slot. That way you can easily upgrade the RAM later.

Depends on what you will be using the computer for. If you just doing basic tasks then 2,4 or 8 gb of ram is good. For tasks such as video editing or audio production, then i would go for the 16 gb.

The way windows works, programs are each assigned a memory space in which to run. Plus they may be assigned additional space of they open large data files, etc. Plus there is space for Windows itself.

At the 8 GB level of memory, you are probably not going to notice a huge difference in performance for individual programs. Where you WILL notice a difference is if you are someone who runs several programs at the same time. You have your email open, you are playing music, you are running Facebook and you are editing a video, you will begin to see the computer slow down because it runs out of memory and has to stop and move things out of memory to keep your current program running.

If you have more memory, you can run more programs at the same time. And you can work with large files (like editing movies.) It may also improve game play as some of the additional RAM may be usable by your video card.

Personally, I would spend the money. But if you do not, you always have the option of adding RAM later.

If you have a program that needs 8 GB to run, then it will run fine on either one. However your computer often has things running in the background that eat up ram so I would go with the 16 GB.

Monster difference in applications that can use it.

Depends on what you're doing.

More RAM will allow you to keep more stuff in memory instead of swapping things back and forth to your hard drive which can happen if you're running a high-end game, or if you like to keep dozens of tabs open in your web browser.

depends on what you shall be using the computer for... if you just doing basic tasks then 2,4 or 8 gb of ram is good... for tasks such as video editing or audio production, then i would go for the 16 gb...