Totally confused by new laptop specs...

D

DellAxim

Gawd
Joined
Feb 14, 2003
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I'm looking for a new laptop because the 3 year old one I'm using has become annoyingly slow. 90+% of my usage is simply web browsing and watching videos like youtube, though I tend to have a bunch of windows open at once. No gaming. I used to be such a computer geek, but haven't kept track of things in a long time. The current specs confuse me.

My current laptop is a 3 year old Asus with 4GB RAM, a Celeron N2830 @ 2.16GHz, and a 5400RPM hard drive. It was on the low end when I got it 3 years ago.

I'm looking for a sub $400 computer. I'm looking at a Yoga 710 with a Pentium 4405Y 1.5ghz, the same 4GB RAM, and 128GB SSD for $379.

When I compare them with PassMark, the old CPU gets a score of 950, while the newer one gets 2058. That seems like a significant difference even though it is more than 600mhz slower, which confuses the hell out of me. Would I find the Yoga to be significantly faster for web browsing activity?

I don't think I'm running out of RAM currently, but I constantly hear the hard drive grinding away and find it very annoying. I was planning on putting a SSD in this computer years ago, but never got around to it. I think my current bottleneck is the CPU and hard drive, but I could be wrong...
 
Atom based Celeron (Bay Trail, but its lineage is the Atom, not the Core. The Celeron in my Chromebook runs circles around the Bay Trails)
RAM...4 is enough, but I wouldn't use less than 8 these days personally. Not a primary system, at least. My ChromeBook is an anomaly, as it runs very well for how little RAM it has. I figured 2 would hinder me eventually, but I'm not taxing it with a single streamed video in Chrome...but it's a tertiary (or lower) system. It was meant to sit in the kitchen or bathroom where humidity or spills were likely to happen. It just ended up getting the most daily use of my systems.
slow HDD.

You're doomed to low performance with that combo.


That Pentium Yoga, on the other hand, is Skylake based. It's still not high end, but it'll be better. Same goes for the SSD. You should notice a very appreciable difference
 
Well, funny enough my laptop died after I made this post, so I had to buy a new one ASAP. I guess it knew I was looking for replacements.:rolleyes: I ended up with a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 4, similar to the other Yoga but 2.1ghz instead of 1.5 and a bigger screen. It has a standard hard drive but I will replace it with an SSD shortly. So far I am pretty happy with it, definitely a lot faster than the old system. It still only has 4GB of RAM, but is upgradeable to 16GB. If the windows task manager says I am only using about 60-70% memory during my normal usage, does that mean I won't get a performance increase if I upgrade the ram to 8 or 16 GB?
 
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