Gaming laptop running slow. (Acer Nitro 5 an515-43)

[onufmi]

Hi guys, my GF has this laptop Acer Nitro 5 an515-43. Its and AMD model with nVidia graphics chip. She asked me if i can make is faster. Everything takes few seconds, sometimes minutes to open. Im talking MS word for example taking 2 minutes to fully open. Games were running slow too. When i looked into task manager i saw Avast taking up most of the resources. The disk was always at 100% (thats not normal, right?). I uninstalled Avast Antivirus and removed some apps from running at the startup. This helped a little but not enough. So i tried installing PopOS (GF is ok with that. She mostly just plays Minecraft and does office stuff). Its better but i think the performance should be somewhere else. Minecraft is playable with 4chunks of render distance, Warthunder on Medium settings. I saw videos of people playing GTA V. I cant imagine her laptop running so well. The wait for the apps to open is the most annoying. Is there anything i can do to fix that??? She said i can do anything except opening it (says that would void the warranty). Thank you for reading.

[TylerD321]

If you continue using PopOS you need to make sure you get the GPU Drivers installed. I found the laptop online and it says it has a 1650, which should be perfectly fine at running most games at low/medium settings at 60 fps.

 

I would verify that the laptop is seeing all 8 gbs of ram. Another check you could do is to make sure the laptop is actually using the GPU. A quick google search says the processor has integrated graphics so it could be defaulting to that. Power settings could be another limiting factor. Some games have a setting that saves power on laptops, CS:GO comes to mind - I would disable this if it does. Laptops also perform significantly better when they are plugged in.

 

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/GB/content/model/NH.Q6ZEK.005

[-rascal-]

Check to see if the laptop is running a typical 5400 RPM laptop HDD, or SSD.

If HDD, grab a SSD either SATA or M.2.

[onufmi]

32 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

If you continue using PopOS you need to make sure you get the GPU Drivers installed. I found the laptop online and it says it has a 1650, which should be perfectly fine at running most games at low/medium settings at 60 fps.

 

I would verify that the laptop is seeing all 8 gbs of ram. Another check you could do is to make sure the laptop is actually using the GPU. A quick google search says the processor has integrated graphics so it could be defaulting to that. Power settings could be another limiting factor. Some games have a setting that saves power on laptops, CS:GO comes to mind - I would disable this if it does. Laptops also perform significantly better when they are plugged in.

 

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/GB/content/model/NH.Q6ZEK.005

Laptop is plugged in all the time so i hope the power is not the limited. PopOS is showing 6.2GB of ram. I will check the RAM. I will remove it and put it back. You got me with the GPU drivers. I Forgot to check it when i installed it. I will do all that and report with the results. thank you