Slow work laptop

[Dachster]

I just started my own business as a programmer and I needed a new laptop for that.

At my previous jobs I've had 2 Dell XPS 15 and while they were for the most part pretty nice laptops, I had the motherboard replaced in both of them due to various issues.

For this reason I figured I wanted to try something new, and maybe a bit more compact (Which I figured was fine, since I didn't need the graphics horsepower that the XPS' provided).

 

My decision fell on the Lenovo C940 in part because it had the all new Intel 10th gen chips and other than that it checked off most of the things on my laptop-wishlist.

Also according to Userbenchmark.com the I7 1065G7 CPU should be pretty much equal to the two i7's in my old XPS 9560 and 9570 which seemed like plenty of power to me.

 

What I'm experiencing currently is a whole different matter. The entire machine grinds to a halt (well.. almost) whenever I save my work in my IDE and the code (Typescript) auto-compiles and the browser auto-updates. I feel like I'm wasting my life waiting. I never had this issue with my XPS machines.

Am I expecting too much from this machine? Is it meant more as a text-editing, browsing and on-the-go machine?

What experiences do people have coding on machines like this?

 

Additional information:

Looking at the CPU usage it doesn't even seem to be running at 100% when it's being slow and laggy.

The power profile is set to performance and it's an issue whether it's plugged in or not.

If it's not the CPU that's the bottleneck, what then? It doesn't seem like a disk issue to me since it's not only slow but also the entire interface is lagging while it's working.

I did a fresh install of Windows when I got it to get rid of any bloatware, and running a CPU profiling tool it's mostly Node, my IDE and Chrome that are taking up CPU resources.

[Dachster]

As per usual with these kinds of posts writing it out helps debug the issue.

I figured I might aswell check and see if there was anything interesting in the BIOS, and sure enough there I found "System Performance Mode" which was set to "Battery Saving" out of the box.

Setting it to any of the two non-battery saving modes made the laptop perform as I would've expected it from the beginning.. However it has also turned into a jet-engine whenever I do any work.

Well as long as I don't get killed by my co-workers due to the noise I guess I'm actually able to get some work done now.

[genexis_x]

9 hours ago, Dachster said:

according to Userbenchmark.com

doesn't have reliable info, 1065G7 is about the performance of 7300HQ in reality

9 hours ago, Dachster said:

If it's not the CPU that's the bottleneck, what then?

check RAM usage

 

Are you buying in US? Max budget? Preferred max weight and min battery life?

[9eorge]

Yeah like Genexis said check the ram usage, The old laptop i used for school that had like 4 gb of ram would do something similar if i used up the ram with like, chrome tabs