Diagnosing a slow laptop

[Fergal]

My laptop often runs very slow. Specs below:

Dell Latitude
Intel Core i5 @ 2.3GHz
16GB RAM DDR3
Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7)

Novabench benchmark score is 849.

Could you please give me some pointers on how to figure out why it is running slow?

Thanks

 

[Track Drew]

Run UserBenchmark and post the URL of your result here.

 

[Fergal]

Thanks very much for your reply Track Drew. I've done that with these results: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/14097941

Everything else was closed on the laptop when the test was run, does this suggest that there is something running in the background slowing down the laptop?

Thanks again.

 

[CAD4466HK]

Thanks very much for your reply Track Drew. I've done that with these results: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/14097941

Everything else was closed on the laptop when the test was run, does this suggest that there is something running in the background slowing down the laptop?

Thanks again.

The i5-5300U is a 15w 2c/4t web browsing CPU. It was never meant to be fast. Any CPU with a "U" at the end of the model means ultra low wattage.
And It seems to be throttling since it's max boost speed is 2.9GHz, yours is 2.7GHz. Unless Dell gimped it.

https://ark.intel.com/products/85213/Intel-Core-i5-5300U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_90-GHz

And yes according to that sites info, your CPU was seeing 24% background usage. Being as you upgraded to W10, it could be a bunch of apps in the start menu running that you don't need. Try right-clicking on the apps you don't want/need to disable/uninstall to free up some resources.

And being a spinner, your HDD is extremely slow as well, an SSD could help you a lot.