inherited a 6 month old laptop that is super slow. are the specs bad or is

bigdan

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My Dad gave me his slightly used laptop. It's functioning way slower than I'd expect a lightly used one to so I'm wondering if there's some kinda problem that can be fixed (viruses etc) or whether it's the specs themselves that are a problem.

I've done a virus and malware scan so that's not specifically the problem. Just bringing that up as an option since I don't know what else the issue could be.

Also of note that this computer is technically 2 years old. Jan 2018. It was used for 6 mths, given to me mid 2018, and I just started using it now.

These are the specs:
Acer Aspire 3
AMD Dual-Core A9-9420 with Turbo CORE Tech up to 3.6 GHz
AMD Radeon R5 Graphics
6 GB DDR4 Memory
1TB HDD

One more thing to note is that it's pretty loud at times (whirring sound, not speakers), and then goes completely silent at times. Not sure why there's such a variability. I wonder if that's a necessary processing sound or could that be because of dust building up inside?


I hope someone can advise! If the specs just suck then maybe it's time I actually bought something new from Best Buy.

Also is there a site I can input computer configurations into to compare speeds? I don't know how to make sense of chip speeds, and whether a bit of an increase in chip speed is more or less imp than a 2 GB increase in RAM etc. So it would help to be able to enter details somewhere.
 
Spec wise... Not that great...

It's a 3 year old AMD processor, 2 cores, came out around 2016/17. It was designed for basically the bottom of the barrel use, basic web browsing, word processing. It wont be "fast" in any sense, ever.
 
Ahh crap. Oh well what to do

I went to a site today that does performance benchmarks and it said this was functioning way below how it should be, ie it's in the 40th percentile. Is there something I can do to make it perform the way it's actually supposed to, however limited that may be?
 
With it being a laptop all you could really upgrade would be the RAM and storage. An SSD would help it to load things faster. If it can handle more RAM then max it out.
 
Is there a way to tell if I can expand the ram without opening it up?

And when I said it's functioning at 40th percentile I believe that was compared to other laptops with the same configuration, which I would assume is also the same ram. So I was wondering what I could do to boost performance without upgrading?
 
What are you trying to do on it? You have better specs than me, I stream HD video on yt, download music, run word and IDE etc. It's not going to be great at multi tasking maybe 2 or 3 browser tabs max.
 
Try doing a refresh and start new. Press windows key on keyboard, start typing settings, Go to change PC settings ( in windows 8/8.1 and 10 probably gives you the same option,) it will say "remove everything and reinstall windows" under the General tab
 
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Kids got a similar pair of HP laptops for Christmas that Best Buy was selling for 200 bucks. These came with the same CPU except it's a 9425. They also came with 4GB of 2666 RAM and a 128GB NVMe SSD. The CPUs in these are abysmally slow and really nothing you can do can speed them up. I would say upgrade to an SSD but these shipped with one and it doesn't help much since doing anything maxes the CPU, even opening simple programs like a browser. Even though they shipped with 2666 RAM they are capped at 1866. I put 16GB of RAM in one and there was a difference due to the big limitation of 4GB, it wasn't exactly night and day either. If you want to continue using it the best I can say is get an SSD for it, nothing fancy.
 
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