I just bought a Lenovo with 8GB of RAM and when I download movies or games from Steam it starts running really slow until I can barely move the mouse. Is that normal or do I have some issue with the drivers?
Don't install third-party drivers unless you're sure they're official Lenovo ones, because that almost always makes things worse. What's probably happening is that 8GB of RAM isn't enough when you're downloading something large while your system is doing other stuff (updates, antivirus, etc), so your computer starts using virtual memory on the hard drive, which is way slower. Before you blame the drivers, open Task Manager while you're downloading something and check if RAM is hitting 100% or if disk usage is maxed out. Did you see anything weird there, or does it just hit that point and you don't know what's eating up resources?
When you download something large, Windows uses the disk as temporary RAM (paging file) and that kills your speed if your computer is already maxed out. 8GB is pretty tight for downloading while you've got other stuff open - Chrome, Discord, whatever - because all of that competes for memory and the system starts using the hard drive like it's RAM, which is super slow. Before you blame drivers, open Task Manager while you're downloading something and check the Performance tab: if you see RAM hitting 100% and disk usage at the max, problem solved - you need more memory or you have to close applications before downloading large files. If RAM is chill but it's still slow anyway, then check what programs are launching at startup because some of them are running the show behind the scenes.
8GB of RAM in 2026 is on the tight side for large downloads if you've got other stuff running at the same time, but that shouldn't freeze the system completely unless something else is going on. The problem is almost never just RAM - your hard drive is probably at capacity or the system is using a ton of swap (virtual memory), which makes everything painfully slow.
Before you touch anything with drivers, check two things: open Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and see how much free space you have left on the disk. If it's below 10-15%, that's what's freezing you. Also look at the "Processes" tab - sometimes Windows Update or antivirus start working right when you begin downloading and eat up all your bandwidth and CPU. Try clearing some space, disable automatic downloads, and then try again.
Lenovo drivers generally come fine from the factory, so that's not your main issue 🌱 If it's still freezing after you free up space, then yeah it's worth updating the video card drivers from Lenovo's official site, but that's Plan B, not Plan A.
Before blaming the drivers, open Task Manager while you're downloading and check what's eating up all the RAM - if you see the disk bar at 100%, it's because Windows is using storage as virtual memory and that's what's freezing you, not a software issue.
What nobody mentioned is that the hard drive can be the bottleneck: if your Lenovo has a mechanical drive instead of an SSD, large downloads overload it while the system tries to do paging. Try downloading just one thing at a time without having Chrome, Spotify, or Steam open in the background, and if it still freezes, consider upgrading to an SSD or adding more RAM.
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