Hi CTH, I'm here for some advice as usual.

Our daughter is off at university, and the laptop we bought here a little over 3 years ago is getting a little slow for her.

She tells me:

I asked her about Chrome tabs, and she sometimes has 30+ open (6 instances of Chrome x 5 tabs). I believe that can slow things down, but I'm not sure how much.

Here are her computer specs:



Any thoughts or suggestions as to whether this computer should be up to the task or if she should consider an upgrade (memory?) or replacement, would be greatly appreciated.

welp 6 instances of chrome and 30 total tabs will do that to 8 gb ram. chrome is notorious for hogging system resources
if upgrading to 16 is not an option, tell her to try the new Edge browser from Microsoft https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge
it's also Chromium based and works just as well, but without the resource issues. I believe there's next to full integration with Chrome extensions, like ad blockers and the various useful add-ons.

laptop could also be in need of a good clean, both physical and software wise, but for the moment switching browser should solve the problem for a while

if all you had said was the 30+ chrome tabs, then i would have said that she was tapping out the memory.

but vectorworks appears to be a building information modeling (BIM) package. i'm not familiar with vectorworks, but we use autodesk revit quite a bit, and it can be very intensive. we have workstation grade desktop computers with quad core xeon processor, workstation graphics card, ssd, 32GB ram, etc. they can still be slow with very large building models. so do you know if she is using vectorworks heavily, and/or is the problem the worst when she has vectorworks open? vectorworks system requirements - https://www.vectorworks.net/sysreq

i dont use photoshop, so i cant comment on that.

if she can grab a screenshot of the task manager processes when she is experiencing the slowness, then we might get a clearer idea. but if she needs to do fairly intensive things, then a thin/light laptop might not be up to the task. more memory might help, but after only quick googling, it's not clear to me whether the memory is actually upgradable.

hang on for some others to respond - i just wanted to toss in my experience with revit.

apparently no memory upgrade paths for that Swift model

I've brief experience with Photoshop and 8gb should be just fine for the average user, unless she has to edit super high res photos like 8k+ or applying 20-30+ layers

vectorworks does sound like a workstation grade application like joe pointed out above, so there's only so much you can ask from an entry level consumer laptop

quick way to free up ram https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/download/standard

uninstall useless applications, also remove anything but essentials from startup list and do a registry clean

she can also try and set the windows power plan to high performance in both wired and battery mode and disable eye candy like transparency effects, animations, shadows for that little extra boost.

but most of all, don't have everything run in the background at once, esp if running demanding apps like vectorworks

with just 11 tabs (3 stream/yt) my chrome is using almost 1.6gb. light background programs and my system is using 5.6gb. having her check the task manager in a few conditions would definitely help.

To me it seems a little early to trade in a 7th gen Intel i5 system. They should last various years more. Try and have her improve her habits. Is it really necessary to have all that stuff open at the same time?

How much CAD and Photoshop is she doing now/will be doing in the future? CAD/CAM is its own beast and a thin and light laptop just isn't generally well suited to it.
A 15w class processor, onboard graphics and 8GB of RAM aren't going to provide a good experience, heavy CAD use is basically like towing a boat with a Prius, it's just not what it's built for.

Going to a 45w CPU, dedicated GPU and more RAM will step it up. These are just examples of the class, HP and Dell make similar options. I'd consider the x1 extreme more for light CAD and up to serious PhotoShop. The P series would be in play if you needed a setup more likely to be on the vendor hardware support list for the CAD package (Quadro GPU). Used options within the past 3 years for this class should be ok, I'd aim for minimum of 16GB RAM (or upgrade to 16/32GB yourself) and 500GB SSD.

x1 extreme
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops.../p/22TP2X1X1E3
P Series mobile workstations
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops.../p/22WS2P1P1N3

It is necessary to clean up the laptop,but I don't think it has much to do with upgrading the laptop.

Intel's SKU numbering across mobile and desktop makes this a bit muddier than it should be. 7th Gen U series (15w) CPUs are still 2 core 4 thread parts. 8th Gen and later U series started offering 4 core 15w parts.

Thanks so much for the great advice, everyone. I had suspected Chrome could be part of the problem, which is why I asked her about tabs - I know she has a habit of keeping them open. With all online courses at university this year, she ends up with a lot of readings and research in open tabs - I've introduced her to OneTab, which saves all the open tabs in a browser to be easily opened later with one click. She also ran CCleaner and went with all the recommendations it offered up.

Sad we can't upgrade the memory; I just assumed that was possible on every laptop these days.

I think the plan for now is she's keeping less tabs open and using OneTab when she needs to, and we're going to get on a video chat one day this week so she can screen share and I can have a look at her Task Manager and give her advice on what we can close, clear out of startup, etc.

In the meantime, she's been having a look on Task Manager herself. One thing we both thought was odd - Task Manager itself is usually at 10-15% CPU usage. I've found on my own computer, it might start at 5-10% for a couple of seconds, but then drops to below 1% and typically stays there. On her computer, it seems to stay in double digits. Not a big deal, but odd.

Thanks again for all the advice, and more is always welcome.

Unfortunately soldered memory has pretty much become the norm on consumer and thin and light/ultrabook style laptops. It allows for thinner designs and additional manufacturer profits since you have to buy all the RAM from them in the initial purchase. I'm not certain if it's the OEMs or Intel to blame, but RAM upgrades are sometimes tied to upgrading the CPU model as well on these soldered RAM systems (i.e. can't get an i3 with 16GB RAM on some models).