I'm trending towards being a sorry old curmudgeon bemoaning why my iPhone 5 and thinkpad x41 aren't useable any more. But here I go again...

Lenovo Thinkpad W500, obtained about 2008 (second hand at the time...). Windows 10, 64 bit. 4gb RAM. Intel Core Duo, 2.80 ghz (2 cores).

Now let's compare a currently for sale base model Microsoft Surface. 4 gb RAM. Intel Core M3 (2 cores), 2.6 ghz.

Looks pretty much the same to me. Yet my W500 can barely keep a single tab in firefox open without crashing. With nothing apparently running, memory utilization was over 50%. (Is there any way to disable the oh so great assistance Windows blesses us with by consuming all the "unused" RAM--and seemingly making it unusable?) Only a couple years ago I was still able to open dozens of tabs while running Visual Studio, Excel, and more things at once.

Is there something substantive in the specs that has changed in the last 10 years that I don't see and that explains how the W500 is dead now? Obviously hard disk capacity has been increasing something like exponentially. But RAM and processing speed haven't I don't think.

What am I missing?

The Surface has an SSD, an on-die graphics chip integrated into the processor that could compete with many an old desktop/laptop that you would have to pay extra for, and that chip performs with much less power because you're comparing an extremely low power part to a mainstream laptop part.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-...l-Core-M3-6Y30

Also, it sounds like you're using the original HDD in the laptop. The name of the game in chips is IPC instead of Ghz, these days.

Good point about the hard drive. One of my check boxes in getting the W500 (and A31p before it) was two spindles / drives. I put a 1st or 2nd gen Intel SSD in there. But now somehow I've wound up back on the original Hitachi after changing dual boot preferences.

But just as I type this with a single tab open in FireFox I get a computer low on memory pop up. Yet I only see roughly half a gig out of 4 accounted for in Task Manager.

I've tried to look this up before--why memory consumption is always so high. The the conversation seems to go is: "Why is my memory consumption 75%? I have nothing open." "Windows 10 is supposed to do that. They are making your life easier in the background. Don't worry about the percent. The memory is not really taken. Trust them. They know what they are doing and you don't." "But if the memory is not really taken then why am I getting low memory warnings and application crashes?" "Trust them they know what they are doing and you don't."

I still hope to find some setting or settings to make Win 10 run light.

4gb RAM. Firefox this one tab uses 180mb. Service Host and Antimalware 100mb each. A few things at 50mb. A dozen or two and 10mb and less.

And yet memory use: 72% of 4gb. And Firefox crashing.

Maybe reinstall Windows. Maybe Firefox is leaking (but Chrome crashed too, except just a tab at a time). Was Vista hugely less demanding than Win 10?

Thanks for the comments.

Your bottleneck is the HDD, probably the processor, and maybe a little bit of memory.

Don't revert back to Vista because security updates were end of life'd by microsoft. You can do all the usual heroics to make it run semi-functional by clean installing win 10 to your SSD and pitching the HDD completely.

But why? Its 10 years old - installing driver updates on a laptop that is 10 years old may not work well. And by the time you finish driver updates and getting it to work, it still may be barely capable on an SSD, and you could have driven to Best Buy or w/e and bought something that works.

You're blaming Windows, and not the components of the laptop.

1. Clock speed comparisons between different generations of cpus aren't indicative of actual performance. A new processor will always be faster because it has better architecture. In fact, from what I ve read, manufacturers have reached the limits of clock speed due to heat output for more than 10 years now. If you go to a website like cpu benchmark you can input the two different cpus you are interested in and you are going to see that the new one is exponentially faster.

2. The mechanical drive slows down things considerably.

3. I suspect that one computer might have a page file while the other doesn't. Check your advanced settings to see if you have a page file.

Thanks for the comments. I'm not unwilling to throw down for a new laptop (I just bought my wife a Surface, better than the one I alluded to above--when she already had a perfectly good laptop much newer than mine...). But I want to be sure and understand why I need to.

So why could I run dozens of tabs and more pretty recently and now almost nothing. SAving the biggest point for last, as far as I understand:

Webpages, most or all of them, are more sophisticated and have more features/crap/spyware in them (which I am hereby officially railing against...).

My graphics card is old and weak. (Does this matter so much if I'm not like gaming but just on 2+2?)

I'm on an old spinning hard disk. And I forgot to mention that it's 90% to 95% full. (I do have a dedicated paging partition of 1.5 gb.)

"2ghz" and "2ghz" isn't necessarily at all the same thing. This point gets at what I'm looking for. My education in how to interpret simple technical specs.

I was expecting when I looked up the surface to see that it was like 16 core and that was why my 2 core sucked. A bit surprised it wasn't that at all. But I've also read, as a non-expert, a bit about how multi-threading has not delivered as expected b/c it's so hard to do.

If the proper comparison for the ability to run web browser tabs is not ghz or cores--is there something else simple like that?

So now the choice I have to make intelligently is: Would a new Samsung 250gb (3x my current) SSD probably make my "2.8ghz" 4gb machine as usable as a new Surface or not? (About $100 vs $1 to $2,000...)

Thanks for bearing with.

(Oh and yeah I could just take over the wife's laptop, and I kind of do--but it's an Australian Gigabyte with a chicklet keyboard that is worse than typing on an iphone. I may do it anyway if I have to toss the long-loved t-pad, until I get past the urge to be cheap.)

No, an SSD will not turn your ancient machine into a brand new machine. It will offer a notable speed boost, but not that.

But most $500 laptops will probably offer you a decent improvement. You don't have to spend $2k on a Surface. Unless you want a new Surface, which is a different question.

Your RAM being at 72% is not an issue. The low memory warning refers to disk space, not RAM.
Because your HDD got way overfilled and most likely too fragmented over time, up to the point where it runs out of caching space (hence the crashes) and where it's probably even impossible to defrag.

Replacing the HDD with an SSD along with a fresh install of Win10 will definitely help a great deal. I'd give it a try, there's nothing to lose as you can still use the SSD with a new computer should you not be satisfied with the result.

Going to guess your page file is too small. Whats it currently set at?

Widnows comes with a built-in disk cleaner - google it and find out how to run it (along with how to look up your pagefile size). If that doesn't clear up some space then download WinDirStat. It's a free program that'll give you a graphical representation of what files and directories are taking up all the space on your HD.

I've actually gotten both warnings, hard disk space and RAM space. I'm about 99% the current warnings are for RAM, when the pop up says Close programs to prevent loss.

There was a time longer ago when I was getting a warning for hard disk out of space. That was when I was fooling with my paging file. I dedicated a partition to paging when I got excited about making partitions and trying to "do" things.

This responds to another question as well: the partition is 1.5gb, which I think I saw as a recommendation in the system.

(My former drive space issue was (it's been a while) I think that if I left let Windows manage the paging size or set it myself to or almost to the partition size--I was getting out of disk space errors. So I took it down to 1.3gb and they went away.)

I tried to get the new Samsung SSD yesterday but it's hard to get to the shop in time from work. Obviously I can do it. But I'm tempted to reformat the Hitachi as a single partition. And try a clean install just as an experiment maybe tonight.

(The older Intel SSD is about 75gb. And due to cloning and whatever, I've wound up on a 75gb partition for Windows System on Hitachi. So I could throw the full 185gb or so of the Hitachi at it for a try. It definitely looks like 75gb on either drive is too small. Esp with the new feature updates to Windows.)

I do acknowledge that it's still the old Hitachi. So maybe it's not worth the bother even for a try on a day missing the shop.

Since I asked about metrics, I should better acknowledge the link here. Thanks. My gut reaction to the comparison is that scores of 8.9 vs 5.4 sound not as far apart as what feels like a 90+% drop in performance. Likely the point is that 8.9 and 5.4 actually aren't near each other.

(Though I'll try to improve the hard disk situation too, as least as a learning experience.)

Maybe it's just that my chips are worn out. Down to the bone. Obviously the drive too (in various possible ways).

I've been out of town on a long trip. And I'm sure no one's hanging on hearing about my outcome. But just for reference: it looks like my main issue was that the Win 10 Fall Creators Update was too big for my config to handle--especially the Win partition size. I merged all three partitions (Win, swaps, and data (which I had been sharing with Linux on a 2nd drive dual boot) and now the update worked and W500 (the "dinosaur" per my wife) is almost back to its former glory!

Congrats on getting it fixed for now.

By the time you decide on purchasing a new pc, your future Intel processor may be on a 10nm process by then (2018-2019, estimated). If you want to read more, Intel Ice Lake on Anandtech and ArsTechnica

So I got a 500gb SSD for the old W500. I got stuck trying to transfer my Win 10 license to the new drive, and then stuck trying to buy a new Win 10 license online, while being out of the country, and not wanting to do some kind of on the phone verification. So I went (back) to Linux Mint. Very happily.

But I also moved some code and data to another extra, unused Win 10 laptop that was around. So now I've got Win 10 on 8gb RAM, Intel Core i7-4710MQ, 2.50 GHz, 1tb (spinning) drive (that I hope to be free from soon, when I can fully migrate some F# code).

And...I still get extended lock ups. Not all the time. But today I wake it up after running some code overnight. And it's molasses, at best. Can't switch between applications. Applications frozen. I do a hard power off. Restart and discover that it has an update. It starts frozen at 100% progress for 5 minutes. Then works up from 0%. Then it's still sticking and another hard shut down and more sticking.

It takes about an hour to get it to come around. So much I hate microsoft for...