Het Techies- I need a little help...

Questions-

Is a 10th or 11th generation I-3 chip with 8GB of ram fast/powerful enough for a home laptop being used for internet, email, word processing and very rare, small spreadsheets?

I have a HP notebook with a Pentel Pentium Silver chip and 4GB of ram and Zoom starts to cut me off for a second or two every 30 seconds or so. Others on Zoom calls with me say my image and voice are fine. Downloading websites is very slow, wireless speeds being fine. Downloading websites is very slow.


https://www.costco.com/hp-14%22-laptop-intel-pentium---windows-10-in-s-mode---1080p---microsoft-365-personal- (1-year-subscription).product.100511587.html

https://www.costco.com/hp-14%22-laptop---11th-gen-intl-core-i3-1115g4---1080p.product.100722439.html 


(Amended to provide greater detail)

Did you ask Ram?

Absolutely. Although if you can spare it, upgrading to 16 GB of RAM would be a a worthwhile upgrade.

It'll be fine for all that, verify that it's not using a HDD and instead had an SSD for storage. The vast majority of laptops are using the solid state drives nowadays, but on some cheaper devices (i.e., where you can sometimes find I3's) they cheap out and go old school mechanical HDD.

Go for it.....[ram27bat]

Second CBDs comment. It does look like what you’re looking at has an SSD. I believe for your use case this will be a great device for you. It also is upgradable so if you need to add more SSD capacity or RAM you can later on down the road. I say go for it.

Also, as far as your download speeds being slow, do you know who your internet provider is and what your plan is? Usually slow downloads are an issue with IP or network hardware, router or modem, not the actual computer.

This is definitely my machine. I am having other problems too.

Sometimes just deleting some of the porn will help.

Outrageous suggestion. 😳

Contact teedub. He might let you store some your archives on his cloud account.

If you are downloading you are doing it wrong

maybe I should send a (complimentary) VHS cassette copy of Three Tracks in the Snow?


Frankie Tripod

Robert,

I’ve got an I5 with 8 gig RAM for work
I’ve got an I5 with 16 gig RAM for work
I’ve got an I7 with 16 gig RAM for home.

There is no comparison to how much better performing the I7 is.

It costs a bit more though but the I7 setup is very nice.

Yep... HP Envy with the I7 8th gen.

If slowness is a problem, download the free CCleaner and run it including the registry run, download the free Malware Bytes and run it. If you don't have an AV program - get one - Avast is good and free. Download the CCleaner defraggler and run it (may take several hours-don't believe the time left it reports). If that doesn't speed things up, add more RAM or buy a better computer.

The biggest issue you have on your current machine is that pentiums are slow to begin with, and windows 10 in its resting state uses about 4 GB of RAM by itself. On a lot of the lower tier computers they have a tendency to skimp out on the internals including the network cards.

None of the things you listed doing are very resource intensive, an i3 with 8GB of RAM would get by. I would recommend going for the i5 though.

Hi Robert,

Based on the information that you provided, the short answer is, yes that particular machine (HP 14-dq2033d) will likely meet your needs for now, but it is unlikely it will exceed them. At least not by much. Depending what you might use it for or how long you keep it around, this might be an issue.

If you don't mind dropping an extra $100, there is that same chassis available with an i5 and an extra 4GB of memory available for $549 right now. The difference in the cost of those two upgraded components is more than the $100. 50% more memory, about 40% (on paper) more CPU performance. Can't say if will be 50% faster or not, it might be less, or it could be more, it depends where the bottlenecks are in that machine's design. It's still an entry level notebook, but the chassis seems to work for you and you appear to like it, so no sense changing models or brands.

I do think though, that you would be happier with the slightly upgraded model. In 30 years of engineering, IT, system integration & automation, I have NEVER once heard someone say "That computer is too fast, I hate it. I wish I had bought the lesser model."

The link for the i5/12GB version for $549 is:
https://www.costco.com/hp-14%22-laptop---11th-gen-intel-core-i5-1135g7---1080p.product.100699352.html 

Just get the i9 and be done with it.

[sarcasm]

Got my current laptop on Adam's recommendation.

The brutha knows his stuff. Just sayin'.