Ummm.. Laptop Question

Anyone here any good with computers. I bought a budget laptop last year, haven't really used it. Turned it on like once every 3 months. Now I'm using it more often and this E36 M3 is slower than my genesis coupe.

Any recommendation as to what I can do to boost the performance. As it is right now I want to throw it out the window. I'm pretty good with a screwdriver so installing shouldn't be hard. I just don't know what to change.

Model: Asus X540LA-SI30205P

Asus X540L laptop Specifications;

Operating System: Windows 10 Pro Processor: Core i3 Hard Disk: 500 GB 5400 rpm SATA Memory: 4 GB DDR3 Graphics: Integrated Intel® HD Graphics 4400 Camera: VGA Network: Gigabit Speed and 802.11 b/g/n wifi

Just need something for basic web surfing, excel, some light photo and video editing. Nothing fancy.

Or would it be better if I chuck this out the window?

Clean it up. Go into "add/remove" programs and start uninstalling stuff you don't use.

You are probably feeling slow because your computer is running a lot of junk you don't need in the background.

Also, run some free virus and malware scans.

If you want to make a dramatic difference, replace the hard drive with an ssd.

Nis14 wrote: Hard Disk: 500 GB 5400 rpm SATA

Here's your problem. Replace that with an SSD and it'll seem like a brand new PC.

In some cases, there appears to be a Windows 10 bug related to the "Tips About Windows" feature. I had this happen to my own Windows 10 installation. If your hard drive light is on constantly even when you're not doing anything, try this:
1. Go to Start Menu --> Settings
2. Go to System
3. Go to Notifications and Actions
4. Turn off "Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as I use Windows"

After a restart, the effect was immediate - I went from pegged at 100% disk usage when the machine was supposed to be idle to 0.

In reply to szeis4cookie:

Dang, wish I tried that before I went nuclear on my laptop a few months ago when I thought it had a virus for that exact reason.

Resetting windows did seem to fix my problem though, along with removing all my programs.

Everything everyone has said is good advice. Ditching background processes and uninstalling bloatware can go a long way.

If you want to get more serious, stuff some more RAM in there. 4GB is really the bare minimum I would run on a modern system. I would get another 4GB stick or even a 8GB stick in there. A solid state HDD would be really nice, but that will cost the most and be the toughest to do. I just picked up a SSD-equipped laptop myself, and it's lightning quick. If you go that route, grab a 2.5" enclosure for the old drive so you can still have the extra 500GB when you need it.

The SSD is the easy button, like putting slicks and nitrous on an otherwise stock car.

The SSD would band-aid-fix these other problems:

• Not enough RAM assuming the OS is 64bit. The SSD helps this by giving you a super-fast swap file.

• Swap file may be fragmenting. If you had excessive RAM you could disable the swap file entirely for a nice performance boost (because Windows' swap management is idiotic and it will use some no matter how much RAM you have), but disabling it and then re-enabling it at a fixed size would prevent fragmentation. SSD performance isn't affected by fragmentation.

More RAM and an SSD

red_stapler wrote:

Nis14 wrote: Hard Disk: 500 GB 5400 rpm SATA

Here's your problem. Replace that with an SSD and it'll seem like a brand new PC.

+1 Best upgrade you can do.

Also, up it to 8GB of RAM if you can.

win10 is just evil.

Uninstall windows and replace with Ubuntu. It will make you computer multiple form factors faster.

If you go with an SSD, be extra careful to take regular backups. When hard drives fail, it's usually not an irrecoverable failure with zero warning. But this is the typical failure mode for SSDs.

I have an old laptop that I have been debating replacement on. It is a bit older than yours though. As I look at the sales at Office Depot, Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, and Newegg I just can't justify paying 70% of the cost of a new laptop to buy the parts to have similar performance but likely less on my old laptop. Plus you have battery life and replacement coming up sooner.

Windows 10 is surprisingly usable on older hardware. I've got it running on a machine at home that is 7 years old, and kind of low end when I built it. As long as you have enough RAM - if it was ok running Windows 7 it'll be ok running Windows 10.

For reference, I have at home: AMD Athlon II X2 processor - two cores at 2.9GHz
800GB hard drive
4GB RAM
AMD integrated graphics from like 6 years ago

I picked up a new laptop myself a few weeks ago. Specifically, this one:

HP Pavilion X360

I was coming from a 8 or 9 year old Toshiba laptop with a Core2 Duo and 3GB of RAM with a 320gb HDD running Windows 10. Doing anything with it was glacially slow. The new one has a 7th gen i7 with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. Between the 8GB RAM and the SSD, everything is instant. Boot up takes about 10-15 seconds from full off, and I haven't been able to slow it down yet. I'm sold on SSD's now.

FWIW, as part of my day job as an "IT Guy", I'm basically in charge of ordering PC's for my company. I've been ordering machines with similar specs to yours for most people, and they seem to be decent for work. However, I do get the occasional complaining of slowness when people are doing any sort of "heavy lifting". When someone needs a more powerful machine, it's more RAM and SSD time. I don't hear complaints after that.

As stupid as it may sound, clean out the internet history. It does wonders.