New laptop horrendously slow, would buying more RAM + installing an SSD help or will the CPU bottleneck it?

Calvinb81

Honorable
Nov 5, 2013
1
0
10,510
I bought a laptop for my girlfriend to help her with her college work. Didn't want to spend too much but I thought the laptop I bought would have handled things such as browsing the web, facebook and Microsoft office with ease however this is not the case.

It freezes up with simple tasks such as literally just opening up google chrome.

This is the laptop - http://www.argos.co.uk/product/5486409

Would putting in an SSD for the OS and upgrading from 4GB of RAM to 8GB ram help it at all? Or is the problem the CPU?
 
Solution
I recommend you to do this upgrade.

I did it also on my 2011 Acer 4349.
Upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB, and added 60GB SSD.
I also replaced it's damn-slow celeron processor to pentium ones.
This upgrade costs me very cheap yet effective to give my laptop a huge performance boost.
Now, its running like a champ. fast and decent for my school need.

Trust me, you will be enjoying your SSD and RAM upgrade (although your CPU maybe slow it down a little bit)

And always start fresh, reinstall your OS from scratch into SSD, DONT CLONE IT!!!
Never put your data into SSD, it will become slooooow if its capacity become full.
Switch to IE or Mozilla, Chrome is a very resource heavy browser.
Check for any background programs or any malware that...

Samaratin

Estimable
Apr 1, 2015
82
0
4,610
I would check what programs and background nonsense are running at startup. That processor should be just fine for basic computing tasks, And while upgrading RAM and switching to an SSD will improve performance, I think something else is going on
 
The SSD and more RAM will not have a significant difference. An SSD only helsp what's on the SSD, no impact when what you are loading doesn't sit on the SSD.... An SSHD would help as it could fit everything and improve speeds, but not of much impact as everything else is pretty far down on the performance scale. We have measured this in the home and in a working environment and no user was ever able to tell which they were using... SDD or SSHD.

our problem with Google Chrome, if you follow the forum threads, is of course Google Chrome. With the times I have messed with it, I have been very frustrated, mostly by its ability to work fine on some boxes and not on almost identical boxes.
 

CelicaGT

Honorable
Jul 22, 2013
89
0
10,610
First off, clean out any and all bloatware, any third party software that is not Windows or device related. You can Google each application by name to determine which are crap. Acer updater or anything of that nature are just hogs. Next, monitor your CPU utlization during any routine tasks such as launching Chrome or Office if you have it using the Task Manager. The purpose of this step is to determine just how stressed that little Celeron is after the bloatware is gone. If things aren't too dire, no spikes to or sustained 100% cpu load then yes...you will benefit from an SSD. Most often these low cost laptops are hampered by slow HDD's which is compounded by all the bloatware they've installed. I always recommend a full reinstall of the OS (not a restore) for best results.
 

alth0triplemadang

Estimable
Feb 4, 2015
62
0
4,610
I recommend you to do this upgrade.

I did it also on my 2011 Acer 4349.
Upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB, and added 60GB SSD.
I also replaced it's damn-slow celeron processor to pentium ones.
This upgrade costs me very cheap yet effective to give my laptop a huge performance boost.
Now, its running like a champ. fast and decent for my school need.

Trust me, you will be enjoying your SSD and RAM upgrade (although your CPU maybe slow it down a little bit)

And always start fresh, reinstall your OS from scratch into SSD, DONT CLONE IT!!!
Never put your data into SSD, it will become slooooow if its capacity become full.
Switch to IE or Mozilla, Chrome is a very resource heavy browser.
Check for any background programs or any malware that running on your system.

Cheers! :)
 
Solution