Why is my Lenovo so slow, compared to the pricing? Alternatives?

[wost]

(Attached picture shows the discrepancy between the percentage of RAM used, and the actual RAM usage. Underneath the 30MB is just some 1-10MB processes)

 

So I've been running a Lenovo Yoga C940IIL (which I bought February 2020) with an i7-1065G7 Processor, 16GB RAM and M.2 storage, on paper this machine should run fast (I also paid like 15000NOK for it, ~$1500). But it's dreadfully slow. It spins up if I have Edge open with like 5-6 tabs and Discord, sometimes YouTube itself struggles to render properly. I used to have general problems where the machine seemed to just ... die, for lack of a better word. The whole machine would grind to a halt with graphical glitches abound, this would happen randomly, often with just a browser open with only YouTube running - this has seemed to stop, but the machine still is dreadfully slow, based on what I bought it for.

 

Right now, as of writing, task manager tells me the computer is using about 90% of the memory (13.7GB of an available 15.7GB). I'm just running 6 tabs and Discord, and counting up the memory tab in Task Manager amounts to about ~2GB, so I don't know what is using that much memory (is Windows really that much of a memory hog)? Also, at doing at almost nothing, the CPU usage keeps jumping between 7 to 30%.

 

Gaming on this machine is not very good either, but I kind of knew that going in, also with an Iris GPU I shouldn't really expect too much. But still, it struggles a lot even with Valheim with everything turned down to lowest. 

 

Is there anything I can try to do to boost performance? I'm really considering selling this machine for either an M2 Air 16GB, or something else. I would do very light gaming (indie games, the occasional low-settings semi-popular game) and a lot of writing, but I have completely fallen out in the laptop marked know-how. Apparently the XPS is not that good anymore?

 

Thanks in advance.

[MLConian]

Last time I saw a Lenovo laptop do anything like this, it was in dire need of a BIOS update - I don't know exactly how, but the Lenovo Update Manager software was constantly trying to download the update in the background and failing. Only a manual update cycle fixed it.

[jaslion]

4 minutes ago, wost said:

Gaming on this machine is not very good either, but I kind of knew that going in, also with an Iris GPU I shouldn't really expect too much. But still, it struggles a lot even with Valheim with everything turned down to lowest. 

You got a very expensive office laptop for that money you could have had a decked out asus g14

 

Have you ever opened it up and cleaned it out? These yoga's are notorious for overheating quickly when there is even a bit of dust in them. They also collect dust like no other :p.

 

6 minutes ago, wost said:

the XPS is not that good anymore?

Hasnt been for ages. They overheat like crazy. The new chassis is finally an improvement but if you want to game you better stick to the entry level one still as they sadly still overheat.

 

[lafrente]

Try using chrome instead of edge.

 

[wost]

Thanks for all your answers!

- I tried updating my BIOS, to no avail, unfortunately.

- I'll buy a screwdriver to open up my computer, hopefully tomorrow.

- I hate switching browsers, so much work with logging in everywhere, lol.

[MLConian]

21 minutes ago, wost said:

- I hate switching browsers, so much work with logging in everywhere, lol.

Meh, just use a password manager like Bitwarden and you're golden.

[Qyygle]

If nothing else works, I'd recommend just doing a clean install of windows.

It's a pain, especially if you didn't do it when you first got the machine, but it's probably running on a real crappy OEM Lenovo install of windows. That would also explain why over time, it slowly got a little better, as recent Windows updates pushed out some of the Lenovo crap, but it can't really fix it completely. All the OEMs do this, it's a bit like smartphone manufacturers doing their skin of Android, and I highly recommend nuking new machines to fresh install from a USB install media.

Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com) (I am assuming you're on windows 10)

 

If you really don't want to, you can reinstall/repair in place through the BIOS or settings, which will save your files and programs, but doesn't always catch all the little bugs and things. It'll probably be better than nothing though I suppose. A simpler alternative could be to run DISM and sfc scans to see if anything comes up there.

Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files (microsoft.com)