SSD or new laptop?

martyp

Hi all,

Just wanted to get some advice on something please.

My laptop is an Acer Aspire 2930Z which comprises:
Intel Dual Core 2GHz T4200
4GB RAM (upgraded from 2GB)
500GB HDD (upgraded from 250GB)
Intel 4500HD integrated graphics

I tend to mostly do web browsing and play browser based games, some simple video editing (e.g. in Movie Maker), use Excel.
The browser based games are becoming a bit sluggish and I notice that Firefox and Chrome both contribute to the CPU running at 100% with the fan constantly going crazy.

Someone said these laptops are generally great and sticking an SSD in will see a big improvement. If I did buy a new laptop it would be up to around £200-250 so probably looking at a 2nd hand i5 or something.
I did consider getting a laptop with dedicated ATI or NVidia graphics possibly.
I install SSDs at work and they seem to make quite a difference but another fear is someone mentioned that Firefox can damage SSDs in the way it caches the data?
A desktop PC wouldn't really work, I have a quad core desktop PC which I even tried using VNC to work on. I tend to have the laptop on my lap whilst watching TV.

Any advice/suggestions much appreciated.

Jabba_flabba

If you've not reinstalled Windows since you bought it then that should speed things up, but an SSD will definitely make a big difference to start up times and is well worth doing. Not sure if it'll improve in-games frame rates though, if that's suffering. Perhaps check you've got the latest graphics drivers installed.

If you want to keep your existing Windows installation then I've had good success with very little hassle by buying Samsung SSDs. Samsung offer a free cloning tool which works very well for copying your existing drive to the new SSD. What's I've done in the past is buy a cheap USB drive caddy along with the new SSD and used that to do the drive-to-drive copy. Also has the advantage that you can continue to use the old drive as a USB data or archival drive afterwards.

Might also be worth just checking out how easy it is to get access to the existing drive; hopefully there's an easy access hatch that can be unscrewed on the underside of the laptop. Youtube's a good resource if you're at all uncertain.

martyp

Thanks Jabba_flabba, I was looking at either a Samsung 750 or 850 Evo possibly as the SSD upgrade. I installed Windows 7 about 16 months ago so could try a reinstall. I've avoided installing tons of stuff as I did previously, trying to keep to the basic minimum number of apps I use and not bog things down.
The graphics drivers are the latest, I did find out a cause of the system process running high via process explorer was down to the hardware acceleration of the graphics not being the best. The frame rate on the games does seem to go very low at times.
I swapped the HDD out not too long ago when the last failed, I've got a few USB drives (picked up a 2TB one at Sainsburys for £30 a few months back!) for backup etc. so could even sell the current one.
It does seem to get quite hot as well.

letsbehonest

I fitted a Samsung EVO 850 SSD to a Dell studio laptop running win 7 it came with migration software which made the OS clone simple ( you need a cheap lead, amazon for this) made a big difference to boot up speed 30 secs. All this was much cheaper than buying a new laptop albeit six months later I bought a second hand Dell Latitude core i5 and just swapped over the SSD it's quite a rapid laptop now.

AndyPix

before putting your hand in your pocket ...


As your fan is going mad, i suspect the vents at the side/back of the machine are full of dust and other rubbish. Carefully remove the case and clean this out.
(youtube vids for your model will show you how to do this)
This would have an impact on performance too ..


Next, make sure that its not a malware issue causing ie to consume 100% cpu.
There is no reason this should be the case, even on an old laptop ..


Run malwarebytes from here :- https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/thankyou/


Decline the option for a free trial of pro version

jshm2

I would not bother with an EVO or new Gen SSD on that CPU. But go for a standard Crucial or Sandisk SSD and get some faster RAM instead.

Or you could get a quad core QX9300 upgrade - which will be much better than the standard dual core you currently have.

I personally would be selling that machine and getting something better instead.

System

AndyPix wrote: »

As your fan is going mad, i suspect the vents at the side/back of the machine are full of dust and other rubbish.

I can guarantee 100% this is the case. I used to have a business refurbishing laptops and this was a common problem on the Acers. Basically what Acer did is use a bit of card as a shroud to bridge the gap between the fan and the blades on the heatsink. When they made the card instead of just putting adhesive on the bits that would contact the fan and the heatsink they put glue on the whole lot so what happens is from day 1 dust and fluff starts accumulating on that card and then gets worse and worse.

Fixing it is as simple as removing the bottom access cover which is several screws, looking in the top right corner where the fan and heatsink blades are, removing the card, cleaning out the crud and replacing the card again.

Get a SSD, it will provide the most bang per buck. Don't waste your money on faster RAM as you'll not notice a difference without benchmarking applications. Most of your problems though are the CPU throttling its speed because its overheating due to the fluff jamming up the heatsink.

bsod

You can't. Dust and fluff and glue do not make a processor run at 100%, thereby turning the fan on, software does that. An ssd doesn't change the software.

You can manage what the processor and fan are doing, and how hot it gets in the power settings. If that doesn't help, link to the games.

tronator

bsod wrote: »

You can't. Dust and fluff and glue do not make a processor run at 100%, thereby turning the fan on, software does that. An ssd doesn't change the software.

You can manage what the processor and fan are doing, and how hot it gets in the power settings. If that doesn't help, link to the games.

I think you're wrong here. Modern OS's throttle the CPU if it gets too hot. If a software uses 50% of a CPU and the CPU gets throttled by 50% by the OS, the software uses now about 100% of the (now slower) CPU.

But you're right, the SSD will not solve this problem.

bsod

If the o/s was throttling the clock speed to 50% in order to cool the cpu, the fan wouldn't need to be constantly going crazy

martyp wrote: »

I notice that Firefox and Chrome both contribute to the CPU running at 100% with the fan constantly going crazy.

AndyPix

bsod wrote: »

If the o/s was throttling the clock speed to 50% in order to cool the cpu, the fan wouldn't need to be constantly going crazy

It would if the vents were full of fluff - we are talking about two seperate issues here, that may or may not be related.


100% cpu = cpu hot = fan kicks in.
blocked vents = fan cant get cool air to cpu = cpu gets hot = fan ups it a gear