Intel N4200 Budget Laptop

[mlynn]

About 2 years ago I bought an Acer ES1 533 P9PV from Argos in the UK for the very low price of £189.99

It has 4Gb RAM and a Toshiba 1Tb HDD with Windows 10 64-bit. This was intended for email, web browsing and playing MAME and old computer emulators. It's fine for this purpose but very slow when starting up and running Windows Updates.

 

It was advertised as having a 2.2GHz CPU but it is really a 1.1GHz (Don't Laugh) with 4 cores.

The amazing thing is that it only uses 4 watts of power.

What on earth is the Intel N4200 and why did no-one else use it?

 

At the same time I got a new shiny Dell Core i5 with 8Gb RAM at work with a 500Gb Western Digital Blue HDD and it suffered exactly the same problems. Very slow when starting up and running Windows Updates. This was fixed by upgrading to a Crucial MX500 SSD. The Dell E5470 and SSD cost the company about £650.

 

My point is that I don't think the N4200 is that slow. In task manager it often shows 100% Disk Usage. There are no viruses, spyware or malware on the machine. There are no CPU hogging processes. Yes Windows may be using the swap file a lot and Task Manager is logging that. But why does this not happen if an SSD is installed?

Is there any evidence to suggest that Windows 10 deliberately slows down if a non-SSD drive is connected?

I'm sure that my little N4200 would be fine if I upgraded to an SSD but a 1Tb SSD is about £130 at the moment.

 

 

[alex75871]

The N4200 is perfectly capable of doing the tasks you listed. Upgrading to an SSD will remove slow updates and startups.

 

EDIT:

 

The CPU is capable of bursting to 2.5 GHz. It's possible this has been disabled in your BIOS if you never see your CPU frequency exceed 1.1 GHz base clock.

 

More info here: https://ark.intel.com/products/95592/Intel-Pentium-Processor-N4200-2M-Cache-up-to-2-5-GHz-

 

[ahuckphin]

slow startup caused by the HDD simply because a HDD is not as fast as a SSD. That's the fact. 

However in terms of Windows Update, when installing you'll notice higher than usual CPU usage. This is because Windows needs to decompress the updates which requires cpu power.