Bought a new laptop. It came with an i7 and a gtx 1050Ti. It had been returned so I got it essentially ‘scratch and dent’, but online, for $650. A lenovo Legion Y520.
But to bring the cost down they put only a single 8 gig module in it.
Well it was unusable. Everything took time. Switching tabs, switch windows, pressing the windows key - delays for everything. Clicking a link, bringing up a web form. I thought it might have malware because I would routinely get an hourglass next to the mouse pointer and it would mysteriously jump and become lower resolution.
Just put in another 8 gigs. Now it’s dual channel and it has enough RAM to sate Chrome, at least for now.
Good to hear your laptop is working better, but if you haven’t already it’s a good idea to remove all bloatware from Lenovo and Win 10. The first thing I do if I get a new device that I haven’t done a clean OS install on is remove anything that’s not essential. This is especially true with Win 10 which has a lot a extra “features” that run in the background that can / should be turned off.
If you want to get the most out of your system, visit www.blackviper.com and use the “Safe” settings to turn off unnecssary Windows Services.
Rereading your OP, it sounds like somethings wrong with the graphics board, probably why it was returned. I’ve had the resolution flipping issue with my desktop and swapping out the video card fixed it. Does it happen all the time or only the system’s been on for a while? Could also be CPU throttling because of overheating.
It’s the GPU that makes the difference in cost. That and I probably have a bigger i7 than you. i7-7700HQ. I sorted every laptop by CPU performance on a comparison site and at $779 new, this model stood out among much more expensive variants.
“runs fine” is relative. Maybe you weren’t just on a computer with adequate RAM, or maybe you don’t use chrome.
That doesn’t sound right. As others have said, there’s probably a boat-load of cruft installed which you don’t need. Also, I wonder if the thing has a HDD installed instead of a SSD?
Right now I’m running a machine with a CPU that’s 7 years old and 4GB of RAM. And it’s doing fine.
Bloatware, settings, virus scanners, startup stuff you don’t need, etc., that’s what was going on. You need to take care of this stuff anyway. Get on it.
Lenovo is infamous for bloatware that jacks up new systems. Had an i7 desktop system with 64 GB a few months ago that - out of the box - ran like a dog, but only intermittently. Eventually tracked it down to a rogue Lenovo System Updater process that would use 60+% resources trying to do… something. Nuked the install from orbit: all fixed.
I occasionally keep Dell install images these days - more rarely HP/Acer ones. Lenovo images? Never.
(You may also have a hardware problem as lingyi points out - I haven’t had trouble with the 1050Ti boards in desktops, but the mobile version is a different beast.)
There was also an issue with early 64 bit machines that needed RAM allocated in a specific way, in that both channels had to have the same memory. ie 2x4G sticks instead of a single 8 otherwise it lead to all kinds of issues. That could be the case here in that the mobo prefers dual channel RAM. 8 GB should be more than enough to competently run almost anything unless you have a lot of other stuff running in the background as noted above.
Yeah, I’m glad the OP fixed their problem, but the computer performance with 8GB of RAM just doesn’t sound right at all to me. I’m on a different OS (OS X), but I can’t believe that 8GB is not enough basic RAM for a Windows machine. Two of my laptops have 8GB of RAM; one has 4GB of RAM. Only my (newest) desktop has 16GB of RAM (the older one has 12GB.) I actually had to go look up how much memory was installed on each individual machine, because I’ve not noticed any performance difference on them whatsoever for browsing and using the machine normally.
Now, when it comes to doing more extensive stuff like Lightroom and Photoshop, I notice a little bit of a difference, and I’m sure if I did video editing it would be obvious. But even running Photoshop and Lightroom on my 4GB computer with Chrome running in the background, nothing is to the point where there’s delays every time I hit a button or something. (And two of the machines just have regular mechanical HDDs as their startup disk, no SDDs.)
Granted, this is a different computer, different OS, but I refuse to believe a Lenovo with 8GB is supposed to behave in the manner described by the OP. I think something else is up.
I should also add that they are running very recent OSes from El Capitain to High Sierra, so it’s not like they’re running an old, less intensive OS like Panther or anything. All of them are running OSes released within the last two and a half years.
If you open the Task Manager (Windows + X, then T), what does it show for memory and cpu performance? You can click on the headers to show them in order, so you can see what is eating your memory performance if that’s what the issue is.
Then google what that service is and you’ll likely find other complaints and recommendations on how to deal with it.
On my computer, I was getting seriously bogged down far too often by a memory management service. I can’t recall which one, but I think it was SuperFetch. I disabled the service and the problem stopped. I notice that it is active again, likely because I’ve turned off the computer a couple of times since then, but I’m not having the same issue now.
Until I have the issue again I don’t know, haven’t had it yet.
I do see that with 16 gigs of RAM I am down to just 880 megabytes free. 8415 is “standby” which is apparently a form of cache. This may explain why it’s so much snappier, I wouldn’t have that cache to help at all with just 8 gigs of total memory.
Also I have 6 chrome tabs open, 2 different IDEs, a gaming client, Edge…that’s how I roll. I open a lot more stuff than I think some of the folk on here.
That doesn’t sound like it should be that taxing on the system. I’ll have 20+ tabs open in Chrome running Photoshop and Lightroom (and Photomechanic) on my 8GB system with none of the issues you’re describing, and Adobe products are particularly known for being memory hogs and leaking memory like sieves. I may notice rendering in Lightroom taking a tad longer or doing panoramic composites in Photoshop, but browsing and anything else is as responsive as if nothing were running. I dunno maybe your IDEs or gaming client are particularly resource-heavy or something, but 6 tabs in Chrome is nothing.
Nah, you’re not the only person here who uses IDEs. And 6 tabs in chrome is almost literally nothing, especially because chrome is actually pretty good at not allowing background tabs to hog resources. You can open hundreds of tabs without issue.
Getting a delay on just pressing the windows key is abnormal in the situation you describe.
Maybe. Seems to work fine now that it has enough memory.
And it’s not like I haven’t experienced low memory on a computer before. I had my desktop down to 8 gigs because the rest of the RAM was out running cryptocurrency miners a couple months ago. Similarly unusable - and my desktop is hand built from the best stuff and has no bloatware.
On my desktop with 8 gigs, it crawled until I put the missing RAM back. My guess is you are less perceptive of delays.
That still sounds unusual. Maybe you’re right that I’m less perceptive of delays, but when I’m working, a tiny delay adds up to a lot of time when I’m editing (since I edit thousands of photos at a time), so I would think I’m used to perceiving delays. I mean, you’re getting a spinning hourglass you say. That’s a serious delay in my book, equivalent to a spinning beach ball on my Mac. There is literally absolutely no lag when I, say, switch windows in Chrome on my 8GB and 4GB machines. Or maybe it is an OS issue, too. We’re not quite comparing apples to apples here (pun not really intended, but just worked out that way.)