Gonna attempt to preserve my 7 year old laptop by upgrading it

[Captante]

Wow. Didn't know the 440BX could run a Tualatin too. I skipped on the Tualatin Celeron coz there was a voltage difference (it needed lower voltage than my Coppermine, if I recall correctly) so didn't bother trying my luck for fear of smelling a burnt new CPU.

It couldn't directly... I had a special slot one adapter for mine.

I could have gotten the Tualatin-Celeron 1400 for a few dollars less then the 1200 P3 but overall the P3 was faster despite it's lower clock-speed.

 

[manly]

Make sure that the M.2 slot in your laptop is NVMe and not M.2 SATA. If, for some reason, you wanna go insane on the SSD without caring about price, Samsung 980 Pro 512GB isn't that expensive. You will probably need to re-install Windows if you want to boot from the NVMe SSD (you could try using Macrium Reflect after booting from SATA SSD to clone it to the NVMe SSD but afterwards, I'm not sure if it will boot successfully).

Your current 256GB SATA SSD is MLC (so it's good) but again, if price is no objection, you could choose the Kingston DC500M. Enterprise SSD with guaranteed response times. I can relate to your desire to make an old laptop fast. It's the sort of thing I would sink my money into too, just for the heck of it.

I doubt a 7 year old laptop supports NVMe, although my 5 year old XPS 15 does. I have no idea why you'd even recommend a high end or Enterprise SSD for the OP. Can't believe it's already been five years here, and although I hardly use Windows, it's ridiculous that Kaby Lake is not officially supported by Windows 11.

Anyway, @Captante actually gives some pretty good advice for a change. I personally like upgrading RAM and storage (and plan to on this laptop if the price is right), but it doesn't make much sense to sink a lot of money on upgrading a dual-core system at this point. The only reasons are because you actually need more memory or storage. Living with 8GB RAM is fine, and the main use case for doubling that is if you run a LOT of browsing tabs indefinitely. Chrome in particular is extremely memory hungry and will gobble up all the RAM it can find. I think most of us here are of an age where we've sunk some real money into PC upgrades, for which we never really got good value from.

As for a knock-off battery, they can be pretty cheap but also not perform well. I picked up a generic battery off Amazon because the price was right, but it didn't even match the spec'd capacity. The answer is pretty simple though, get a new battery if you use the laptop unplugged. If not (and the old one isn't bulging), then what's the point?

 

[Mai72]

You should put in an intel I9, and a geforce RTX 3080 w/ 10gb.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Chrome in particular is extremely memory hungry and will gobble up all the RAM it can find.

Just a heads-up: Chrome isn't doing that anymore, at least for me. It unloads idle tabs from RAM.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I have no idea why you'd even recommend a high end or Enterprise SSD for the OP.

DC500M is very affordable for an enterprise SSD. Makes for an excellent workhorse drive for heavy multi-taskers. Sometimes the heart wants what it wants. I was just pointing the OP's heart to one of several potentially desirable directions

 

[Captante]

DC500M is very affordable for an enterprise SSD. Makes for an excellent workhorse drive for heavy multi-taskers. Sometimes the heart wants what it wants. I was just pointing the OP's heart to one of several potentially desirable directions

You can get something 50 to 75% faster for small random reads/writes @ roughly half the price of this older model Kingston SSD and the "durability" features you pay a bunch extra for which do have some value on a server are worth very little to a home-user or gamer.

 

[manly]

Just a heads-up: Chrome isn't doing that anymore, at least for me. It unloads idle tabs from RAM.

Is this documented anywhere, or it varies by OS? Everything I've seen commented, even very recently, is that Chrome and other Web browsers are RAM hogs on desktop OS's. Mobile is different because memory was always constrained, and non-foreground activities could be nuked at any time by the OS.

I don't go overly crazy with browser tabs; but after a few weeks, Chromium 104 (fairly recent) on Linux will have used up all available RAM. At some point, the OS will experience out of memory and then kill processes. I've considered upgrading to 32GB just to avoid this annoyance, but until recently the value proposition wasn't quite there.

You can get something 50 to 75% faster for small random reads/writes @ roughly half the price of this older model Kingston SSD and the "durability" features you pay a bunch extra for which do have some value on a server are worth very little to a home-user or gamer.

Thanks for being the voice of reason. It makes little sense to pump a lot of excessive money into a 2015 laptop with dual core CPU. The main advantages of an enterprise SSD (endurance and IOPs) would be totally wasted on a 7 year old system.

Don't get me wrong, I try to use electronics until they no longer work (as long as security updates are still available). But in the past, I've certainly been burned by purchasing components that never delivered good value for the money. With the PC industry entering a deep plunge after the pandemic surge, there could be a lot of PC deals over the next year.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Is this documented anywhere, or it varies by OS?

Could be. I'm not using Incognito mode anymore since I noticed in the past that it leaks memory. I'm on Windows 8.1 and Chrome has about 3 GB consumed, with five windows each with dozens and dozens of tabs. There are five more windows but they haven't been clicked since I relaunched Chrome from the last time I had to kill it (it's been a few months and I don't restart Windows. Just close the lid and let the laptop sleep). Previously, things would get bad to the point that 95% memory would get consumed. Now only Firefox is doing that. Chrome seems tame now.

 

[Naer]

I doubt a 7 year old laptop supports NVMe

This guy put a nvme ssd in my laptop model

 

[Captante]

This guy put a nvme ssd in my laptop model

There's a substantial number of reports of people having it NOT work too and with your laptop I wouldn't bother anyway since you won't be able to tell the difference between NVME and SATA without running a benchmark.

It's your money to waste though so have at it.... we tried!

 

[Captante]

Could be. I'm not using Incognito mode anymore since I noticed in the past that it leaks memory. I'm on Windows 8.1 and Chrome has about 3 GB consumed, with five windows each with dozens and dozens of tabs. There are five more windows but they haven't been clicked since I relaunched Chrome from the last time I had to kill it (it's been a few months and I don't restart Windows. Just close the lid and let the laptop sleep). Previously, things would get bad to the point that 95% memory would get consumed. Now only Firefox is doing that. Chrome seems tame now.

I've got about 35 tabs open right now and per task-manager Chrome is currently hogging up 16.7 gb's ..... this is very close to the most I've ever seen on my own PC from a single browser.

"Improvements" like that they can keep!

 

[igor_kavinski]

It's your money to waste though so have at it.... we tried!

One must not come between a man and his beloved laptop

 

[igor_kavinski]

I've got about 35 tabs open right now and per task-manager Chrome is currently hogging up 16.7 gb's ..... this is very close to the most I've ever seen on my own PC from a single browser.

Check in Chrome task manager which site is hogging the most? Are you using incognito mode?

 

[Captante]

More like 42 tabs lol.... the worst memory-hog is Youtube (big surprise) but it's not relatively extreme. (number one is "Oblivion Ambient music" for some reason lol)

There are at least a dozen sites using fairly substantial RAM.... I have 32gb's so it's not a problem performance-wise but still annoying.

 

[igor_kavinski]

but still annoying.

Kill Chrome in the Apps section of Task Manager. Relaunch and it will ask to reload the previous session. RAM freed. But weird that Chrome is behaving different for me. Maybe that's coz Firefox is handling the brunt of my browsing.

 

[Captante]

Kill Chrome in the Apps section of Task Manager. Relaunch and it will ask to reload the previous session. RAM freed. But weird that Chrome is behaving different for me. Maybe that's coz Firefox is handling the brunt of my browsing.

RAM usage comes right back with the re-launch.... the only way to free it up "forever" is to delete everything and start fresh.

 

[igor_kavinski]

RAM usage comes right back with the re-launch

Most weird. On my desktop PC (which I mostly use for media consumption since it's connected to my OLED), Edge has 183 tabs. RAM usage for Edge is 3700MB.

 

[Captante]

Edge is somewhat more efficient then Chrome now especially managing mass-quantities of open tabs. People make fun of Microsoft but they actually did a pretty decent job with that browser.

 

[manly]

RAM usage comes right back with the re-launch.... the only way to free it up "forever" is to delete everything and start fresh.

In my experience, this is not quite true. When you restore a session, it doesn't immediately reload all the tabs. They are loaded on demand when you actually bring that tab to the foreground.

Otherwise I agree with you on how Chrome has an insatiable thirst for RAM. Igor is the only person in the world who has his Chrome under control. I wish I could use Firefox more (was previously a Mozilla/Firefox user eons ago) but it just feels a bit clunky for some reason.

 

[Captante]

In my experience, this is not quite true. When you restore a session, it doesn't immediately reload all the tabs. They are loaded on demand when you actually bring that tab to the foreground.

Otherwise I agree with you on how Chrome has an insatiable thirst for RAM. Igor is the only person in the world who has his Chrome under control. I wish I could use Firefox more (was previously a Mozilla/Firefox user eons ago) but it just feels a bit clunky for some reason.

Just now I closed all but one of the 5-6 Youtube tabs I had open and that alone resulted in RAM usage immediately dropping from 16.7gb's to 7.68gb's.... wtf.

ONE tab was using almost 3gb's... Oblivion Ambient music: Night & Day.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I like that Firefox lets me open "infinite" tabs without turning the tab header so small that clicking a tab makes it more likely that I will click the "X" and close it. Also, no need to open a separate window to open more tabs. Google has yet to figure out how to add "<" and ">" on a Chrome window. Then there's the really useful "Select all tabs" and then bookmark them functionality in the right-click tab menu. Invaluable when you want to save your progress if you must close the browser for some reason.

Agree on the clunky feeling. It's a bit less noticeable on an SSD.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Just now I closed all but one of the 5-6 Youtube tabs I had open and that alone resulted in RAM usage immediately dropping from 16.7gb's to 7.68gb's.... wtf.

Maybe the Youtube team hates the Chrome team...

 

[Captante]

Might be time to uninstall/re-install Chrome!

Will try CC cleaner first though.... I hesitate to use it much these days but it can be useful for deleting browser garbage when the built-in utility can't cut the mustard.

 

[manly]

Kill Chrome in the Apps section of Task Manager. Relaunch and it will ask to reload the previous session. RAM freed. But weird that Chrome is behaving different for me. Maybe that's coz Firefox is handling the brunt of my browsing.

The last sentence sounds like the most plausible explanation. If I'm reading your posts correctly, you restore sessions occasionally to keep your dozens of tabs available, while reducing the immediate memory pressure. This makes sense, as most browsers load background tabs on demand rather than all at once.

As for Incognito mode, normally ad blockers do not work in Incognito to maintain the privacy of that mode of browsing. With ads increasingly being embedded videos that auto-play, Incognito browsing can and does result in a lot of extra CPU use and RAM pressure.

Modern Web apps are extremely chunky and can consume a LOT of memory. This is mostly fine, except you never get it all back if you close that particular tab. At some point (days or weeks down the line), you will need to restart your browser. The other problem is that these desktop Web apps aren't well suited for past mobile devices. I still use a 2016 iPad Pro that sadly has only 2GB RAM, and it struggles somewhat with browsing "desktop sites." Looking forward to the imminent iPad upgrades coming soon, and 4GB RAM should now be considered a bare minimum for iPadOS.

 

[Torn Mind]

Met your first and only love online on this laptop? Or is it something as boring as playing games on it endlessly?

I would guess it's music production of some kind.

Although...I...will...take...the...opportunity....

FUCK ACER. FUCK THEIR CHEAP ASS FRAGILE DELICATE CHEAP ASS COMPUTERS.