How to improve web browsing and general laptop usage

SynapticVesicle

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Aug 21, 2011
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Right now I have a Acer V3-551g with a A8-4500m processor and 8gb of RAM and a 5400RPM HDD.

I am looking at the HP 17-BS011DX which has a i5-7200u processor and 8gb of DDR4 RAM and a 5400RPM HDD.

I do prefer the screen on the HP since it is bigger, sharper, and glossy but I don't want to spend that much money unless it will give me a significant improvement to general usage.

When I watch twitch on my Acer it freezes a lot and when I check performance the CPU is stuck at 100%. A lot of times links will be slow or web pages may load slow and I'm not sure what the issue is because my internet connection is fast and I didn't think CPU affected web browsing much.

What I want to know is...should I get an SSD for my old Acer laptop or should I save up and get the HP laptop? Do you think the Acer with an SSD will do tasks faster than the HP without an SSD? Unfortunately I can't afford the HP laptop and an SSD but I may be able to upgrade it later if I get it.

Also if you plan on recommending other laptops you must know that the main reason I chose the HP is because I prefer the buttons on the touchpad and I was able to test the touchpad out at Best Buy. I just got a Lenovo Y500 for a steal on eBay but the touchpad is garbage to me and I'm trying to resell it. I also would like the screen to be at least 900p.

Thanks for the help.

P.S. Do you think the HP will drop in price a lot in the next few months when Ryzen mobile comes out?

P.S.S. How good is the i5-7200u compared to a 1090T
 
with your acer laptop the onboard gpu may be using some of the system ram for video so you may not have 8g of ram for the os. see what the max ram is for the laptop from cruical memeory checker. if it maxed out. start with ccleaner and defrag the hard drive. then in msconfig see what in start up and turn stuff off.
 

Wayfall

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Dec 27, 2013
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Well what's going to speed up your pc while under general usage is a faster HDD or get an SSD. A physical drive is the main cause of a bogged down system. Your fast hardware would have to wait for the physical disk to do it things while with an SSD the computer would wiz along as the SSD has no moving parts and in so can keep up with the other hardware.
 
A SSD is not going to decrease the load on the APU while watching videos. It will still cap out at 100% because it's integrated graphics core is out of date. Twitch videos are encoded with a newer video codec (coder / decoder) that your APU's integrated graphics core has not been designed to process. Therefore, the video decoding gets dumped on the APU; which is not very powerful to begin with. A SSD makes a laptop more responsive because of much higher read / write speeds compared to a hard drive. However, that will not make your APU more powerful, so installing a SSD in your current laptop is a waste of money since you will still be waiting for the APU to processes whatever it is doing.



The i5-7200u is a much better CPU compared to the A8-4500m even though it is a dual core CPU that is capable of acting like a quad core CPU; meaning it can process 4 threads at the same time. How does it compare to the PII 1090T? The i5-7200u would overall perform better since it has two powerful CPU cores and Hyper Threading (as long as programs are designed to use it). The PII 1090T is more or obsolete compared to modern CPUs which has 6 relatively weak CPU cores. Games like Skyim can perform better on a PC with a dual core Core i3-4130 vs an octa core FX-8350 CPU that has been overclocked while both are using the same GPU. The i5-7200u is similar to a desktop Core i3 CPU because both are dual core CPUs with Hyper Threading.

The Intel HD 620 graphics core will have no problems playing back Twitch videos since it incorporates current video codecs. Though it will definitely not be able to handle 8k video which is the next big milestone when it comes to video resolution that is on the horizon.

Mobile Ryzen APUs will not really make any immediate dent in the price of laptops with Intel CPUs. Intel simply dominates the laptop market, and AMD need to convince laptop brands to use their Ryzen APUs.

 
I should point out that the PII 1090t in some ways can be better than the i5-7200u. While the 1090T's cores are old, there are still 6 of them and can help when there are multiple threads of instructions to process.