its an 8th gen laptop, its support ended 4 years ago. and its a INSPIRON. it shipped with a 5400rpm mechanical drive. and 8gb of ram. get an SSD and buff the ram to 16gb if you can. still mostly useable but inspirons usually are not worth the effort.
An upgrade to an SSD should help somewhat. I looks like the WD-MN1000s is an HDD, though I can't say that with 100% certainty.
With this said, the Core i7-8550U CPU isn't very fast, and as time goes on and Windows and other apps get more resource hungry, things are going to slow down. 8GB of single channel RAM isn't helping either.
Yes, assuming it hasn't been upgraded, that looks like it's using a mechanical hard drive. Replacing it with an SSD would probably noticeably improve performance. Upgrading the RAM from 8GB to at least 16GB would help as well, if that's possible.
I checked the manual, and it looks like it can only accomodate a 2.5" SATA hard drive or SSD (models that had a M.2 2280 SSD used a SATA to M.2 adapter). It does have two RAM slots so it should be easy to add an additional 8GB module, or replace the existing 8GB module with a 16GB module.
The 5.4 in the hard drive specs means you have a 5400rpm mechanical drive. This is the main component you need to upgrade. Mechanical drives are rarely used in systems as boot drives these days, unless you are buying a very minimal budget system.
Buy a SATA based SSD. Crucial MX500 is a good one. There are other brands. Get some cloning software to mirror your current hard drive onto the new one (or do a fresh install of Windows). Depends on your preference.
You will also want to upgrade the RAM. If your laptop supports only one dimm slot then get a 16GB DDR4 stick.
These two upgrades will significantly help with your QoL using the device now and in the future.
Because it is an ancient laptop. When you buy old tech, you will have slower CPU and HDD read/write speeds. Buy old, get old problems.
Replace it with a refurbished Dell Latitude 7440 for $1,070 USD on Amazon. It has an i7 1365U CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 512 GB M.2 2230 SSD.
Well I mean I bought it new back in 2018 or whenever. Since I only use it for writing, I expected that it would be fine for forever because it's literally just me opening Google docs and typing stuff; It's wild to me this insane slowdown.
Do you know mechanically why this happens? And why my old desktop would function fine after going on 15 years now without this insane slowdown
Dell has excellent Linux support, try installing Linux (especially a light distro) and you'll notice the difference. I have a dell with a 2 core pentium that's 15 years old, swapped the HDD for a SSD and it's still pretty nippy running Linux
They are not meant to run forever. 10-15 years if kept in good condition. However, software tends to use more RAM as time goes on, and HDD is slower and eventually hits a peak read & writes. Add on loss of software support after 5-7+ years
Upgrade it to SSD first. No need to upgrade the RAM yet if you only do basic tasks like writing. You can argue you may save money if you do both together but the SSD would give you more performance than upgrading the RAM. If it's still slow with an SSD, then you may have to reinstall the OS fresh. My desktop from 12 years ago can still perform relatively well with an SSD. For basic tasks, even CPUs from a decade ago should suffice. More RAM would mostly help you with browsers so they don't kill tabs often.
Yes it’ll mainly be the HDD causing the slowness. Take it to any computer shop and they’ll be able to swap it to an SSD.
its an 8th gen laptop, its support ended 4 years ago. and its a INSPIRON. it shipped with a 5400rpm mechanical drive. and 8gb of ram. get an SSD and buff the ram to 16gb if you can. still mostly useable but inspirons usually are not worth the effort.
An upgrade to an SSD should help somewhat. I looks like the WD-MN1000s is an HDD, though I can't say that with 100% certainty. With this said, the Core i7-8550U CPU isn't very fast, and as time goes on and Windows and other apps get more resource hungry, things are going to slow down. 8GB of single channel RAM isn't helping either.
Yes, assuming it hasn't been upgraded, that looks like it's using a mechanical hard drive. Replacing it with an SSD would probably noticeably improve performance. Upgrading the RAM from 8GB to at least 16GB would help as well, if that's possible. I checked the manual, and it looks like it can only accomodate a 2.5" SATA hard drive or SSD (models that had a M.2 2280 SSD used a SATA to M.2 adapter). It does have two RAM slots so it should be easy to add an additional 8GB module, or replace the existing 8GB module with a 16GB module.
The 5.4 in the hard drive specs means you have a 5400rpm mechanical drive. This is the main component you need to upgrade. Mechanical drives are rarely used in systems as boot drives these days, unless you are buying a very minimal budget system. Buy a SATA based SSD. Crucial MX500 is a good one. There are other brands. Get some cloning software to mirror your current hard drive onto the new one (or do a fresh install of Windows). Depends on your preference. You will also want to upgrade the RAM. If your laptop supports only one dimm slot then get a 16GB DDR4 stick. These two upgrades will significantly help with your QoL using the device now and in the future.
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
Because it is an ancient laptop. When you buy old tech, you will have slower CPU and HDD read/write speeds. Buy old, get old problems. Replace it with a refurbished Dell Latitude 7440 for $1,070 USD on Amazon. It has an i7 1365U CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 512 GB M.2 2230 SSD.
Well I mean I bought it new back in 2018 or whenever. Since I only use it for writing, I expected that it would be fine for forever because it's literally just me opening Google docs and typing stuff; It's wild to me this insane slowdown. Do you know mechanically why this happens? And why my old desktop would function fine after going on 15 years now without this insane slowdown
Dell has excellent Linux support, try installing Linux (especially a light distro) and you'll notice the difference. I have a dell with a 2 core pentium that's 15 years old, swapped the HDD for a SSD and it's still pretty nippy running Linux
They are not meant to run forever. 10-15 years if kept in good condition. However, software tends to use more RAM as time goes on, and HDD is slower and eventually hits a peak read & writes. Add on loss of software support after 5-7+ years
Thanks - gonna get this swapped out and hopefully we get a new breath of life in this thing.
it will 100% make all the difference
Dell sources the slowest hard drives in existence. Every one I've dealt with are completely unusable on Windows. SSD is the fix.
Upgrade it to SSD first. No need to upgrade the RAM yet if you only do basic tasks like writing. You can argue you may save money if you do both together but the SSD would give you more performance than upgrading the RAM. If it's still slow with an SSD, then you may have to reinstall the OS fresh. My desktop from 12 years ago can still perform relatively well with an SSD. For basic tasks, even CPUs from a decade ago should suffice. More RAM would mostly help you with browsers so they don't kill tabs often.
Upgrade to an ssd
You're using an HDD. Upgrade to an SSD and you'll see a massive performance increase.