Recent content by dudeman509

One of the main differences may be the cooling capability of the laptop's cooling solution. Thin, light laptops may be able to run CPUs at their turbo clocks for only a short while in bursts before throttling back due to heat. If you need sustained performance - coding, gaming, encoding, etc...

Try creating a new user profile and see if that works. I've had user profiles get corrupted a couple times in W10 to where the stupid start menu won't even open.

3rd gen would be the same socket as 3rd gen. The 3210M is a socketed processor. Yes, this should work with a QM 4-core processor - something like a 3630QM. Use good thermal paste - the cooler in the Dell may not be able to keep up with the 10w higher TDP of the QM processors, but most I've...

#2 depends on the drive really. The HDD (well, SSD) isn't near the fan in my HP. I had Seagate laptop drives that made a crap ton of heat, and failed constantly in a Dell I had that didn't have good HDD ventilation. We use HP Probooks at work (450 G2 and 840 G3), and they sit in the docking...

I would recommend going with a 2-core i7-640m. The clockspeed increase alone made a HUGE difference from my i5-450m. It's likely the motherboard itself cannot support the power draw of that CPU. On top of that, Nehalem CPUs make a crap ton of heat, and you'd likely throttle due to thermals...

If gaming is the main intention, the extra space on the HDD of the 17" machine might be beneficial - games these days gobble up space like crazy. Personally, 512 + 15", because I don't like 17" laptops.

If you find the WHOLE board for a specific model of laptop on Ebay with the higher-clocked i7u variant, you can switch those out, but the performance difference for the cost it will probably run you probably isn't worth it.

Yeah, but it won't be fast at any of them. If you're cool waiting around for things to happen, it's still capable of them. Youtube might stutter a bit - Core 2 CPUs were massively underpowered potatoes.

The i5 is more than enough for gaming and most usage. Unless you have work or tasks that demand the 6 core processor, I think the i5 is the better buy here with the more powerful GPU.

Not really. Celerons are extremely weak processors. Look for an i3 at the minimum, preferably with 8 GB of RAM. 4 GB is barely enough these days when Chrome gobbles up memory, and 1080p Youtube/other things push the lower end integrated graphics/processor relatively hard. Also, if you want...

Similar with all cores thrown at something; the Intel will be a little bit ahead in single-core operations, which will make day-to-day usability a small bit better. Web browsing, Windows file management, opening applications, etc.