i7 - 12gb - too slow. Solution?

andyhsims

Hi

I currently have a 3 year old zen book, i7 and 12gb ram.

Use it for heavy excel, two skype video chats and 10 chrome windows but it's becoming too slow and is often reacting like my old c64 with letters typed appearing with a one second pause in between.

I have cleaned it and do not have anything running except antivirus.

Do I need more ram?

I dont think I can expand this one further.

Which laptop would you recommend? Want thin and powerful. Ready to pay up for that.

Any help appreciated

EndlessWaves

What triggers it? If it's that slow when you open the first application then it's no lack of power but likely a bug of some sort.

What does task manager show when it's slow? Full CPU use? Full memory?

andyhsims

Hi

It is not slow when started up but it seems that especially chrome and skype slows it.
Memory and cpu usage is around 50 and 30 pct. Quite often memory spikes towards 100

Does this help?

ChuckMountain

Chrome can have a lot of plugins all which start their own thread.  If one is misbehaving it could be using considerable amount of ram.  

Go into task manager under chrome (not the windows one) and it should tell you more information. It should be under tools, more options

noiseboy72

I've noticed the current release of Chrome can cause slow downs and uses huge amounts of memory on occasions.

Are you running an SSD? If not, this is a worthy upgrade.

Large Excel files - particularly if you are doing any sort of data manipulation can also consume huge amounts of resources. I have a consolidated report I run once a week that pulls in 50 or so spreadsheets of 2-5 sheets each and then performs various lookups and comparisons. That takes around 30 minutes to run and god help me if I need to make any changes to it!

EndlessWaves

It's unusual for memory to spike like that, there's not a lot of uses that'll cause something to grab 6GB of memory and then let it go again in a short time. I'm not very familiar with excel's performance characteristics but I wouldn't expect it of a video app or a web browser so it could well be a bug.

Next time it happens see if you can spot which process is using all of the extra memory.

techquest

Download Process Explore, part of Sysinternals, now owned by Microsoft, and take a good look at what is going on on your system with running processes.

Process Explorer - Windows Sysinternals

ChuckMountain

Whilst I agree if it is Chrome, its built-in task manager will tell you what the page or service is PE won't


                                                                               

Press SHIFT   ESC to bring it up

andyhsims

hi everybody

thank you so much
it seemed that gpu process was eating up 1gb of ram alone just opening chrome
i now disabled hardware acceleration and it seems to have improved

again, thank you very much for your help