I get that. But if it was working perfectly well before and now it's suddenly 10x slower, obviously it's not the RAM. I understand the system wants more, but if we do upgrades to this machine, it's probably not going to be to that motherboard, it'll probably be in the form of a new mobo/CPU entirely. So I'm not inclined to spend money on RAM for a motherboard we're ultimately not going to use.
In the mean time, *something* changed that caused the performance to tank and I'd like to try to get the machine back to where it was.
This is so not true. Even if you had more than the minimum, RAM can still be the reason things are slower. I've personally had this issue with insufficient RAM.
Went to bed one night and I went from saturating 1Gb LAN to being unable to stream a single video stream. The issue was insufficient RAM. So it can come suddenly, and like a brick wall.
But to be honest, if you don't have the minimum RAM, virtually nobody here is particularly interested in your issues because we've documented so many issues with <8GB of RAM that we've already done "the due diligence" and made it very clear the minimum is 8GB of RAM.