This may be a very stupid question and everything I know about computers says it probably won't work but I feel the need to ask anyways as I am very far from knowing everything.

Can I setup my laptop (an old-ish Gateway) to draw additional RAM from my custom desktop tower? I have 16 GB of RAM in my tower but only 3 GB in my laptop. I want to setup my Minecraft server on the laptop but I don't know if 3GB will be enough with windows running on it as well as the Minecraft server since those servers tend to need a couple GB of RAM when they get multiple players doing a lot of stuff at once.

Is this even possible or am I just crazy?

Hello,

You won't be able to use the RAM from the desktop in the Laptop or connect the two and use the RAM in the desktop for the laptop.

I would have thought of the two the desktop would make a better server.

Can't say much about Minecraft.

Crazy. From your wording it almost sounds like you want to somehow have Minecraft access the RAM in the desktop from the laptop. Maybe in Startrek, but not in any world I know of.
If you wish to physically swap RAM sticks, then no to that also. The two RAM systems are physically and electrically incompatible.

@gerbil The first option you posted was more what I was going for. I figured it was impossible but I thought since there is so much technology available it might have been possible. The latter regarding swapping the sticks I already knew. Thanks for the info though. I guess I let Star Trek influence my thinking a little too much :)

There are experimental systems that support distributed RAM, but bear in mind that they have horrible latencies since they have to operate over the network. With the faster networks we are getting today, such as 10Gbps switches and NIC's, this may become more mainstream in the future, but for now, what is in a particular system is what it can draw upon.

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