How do I make my 4 year old Dell XPS 15 9560 laptop faster?
September 15, 2022 8:28 AM Subscribe
My laptop is 90% fine, but I want to give it new life.
Are there any hardware upgrades I can do?
Should I do the "reset this PC" option, that keeps all my files?
Should I wipe all my files and do a clean wipe and new install of windows? If so How do I do that?
Thanks in advance!
How much RAM does it have?
Does it have an SSD (solid state drive) and is the drive roomy enough?
It's useful to occasionally run the file cleanup to get rid of unnecessary stuff, and to delete cache and cookies in browsers.
If you know how, find out what's running at startup. For example, if you use Skype once, it may want to run at startup from then on. Same with the Phone app, MS Edge, and who knows what else. I prefer to limit what runs all the time.
Update Windows and your browser.
I don't do this for a living any more, interested to see what others have to say.
posted by theora55 at 8:50 AM on September 15, 2022
Does it have an SSD (solid state drive) and is the drive roomy enough?
It's useful to occasionally run the file cleanup to get rid of unnecessary stuff, and to delete cache and cookies in browsers.
If you know how, find out what's running at startup. For example, if you use Skype once, it may want to run at startup from then on. Same with the Phone app, MS Edge, and who knows what else. I prefer to limit what runs all the time.
Update Windows and your browser.
I don't do this for a living any more, interested to see what others have to say.
posted by theora55 at 8:50 AM on September 15, 2022
Response by poster: I have 16gb of ram, and a 1TB hard drive, that only has 29gigs left (I have lots of movies on my computer). Would deleting those movies speed things up?
I plan to upgrade my ram, I watched the video and found some ram that fits my system, does brand of ram matter?
I think I'd prefer to wipe my whole system and start with a clean install, but wanna figure out how to do that the correct way. I did that once before and couldn't find all the appropriate drivers and it was really painful.
posted by maxexam at 9:19 AM on September 15, 2022
I plan to upgrade my ram, I watched the video and found some ram that fits my system, does brand of ram matter?
I think I'd prefer to wipe my whole system and start with a clean install, but wanna figure out how to do that the correct way. I did that once before and couldn't find all the appropriate drivers and it was really painful.
posted by maxexam at 9:19 AM on September 15, 2022
If you have a spinning hard drive, replace it with an SSD. That's the one true upgrade that makes your computer feel faster.
posted by jclarkin at 9:29 AM on September 15, 2022
posted by jclarkin at 9:29 AM on September 15, 2022
Also, 16GB of memory is enough. Going from 4 to 8 GB is big, 8 to 16 is usually noticeable but 16 to 32 is only needed in specific circumstances.
posted by jclarkin at 9:31 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by jclarkin at 9:31 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
I have a 3-ish year old XPS 13 9310. 16GB and 500GB. Runs Linux just fine....
But yeah, 16GB should be enough if you kill off the "OMG start everything all the time" things. But also a bit yep on the only 29GB out of 1TB is very likely your slowdown. The SSD is fine and dandy, but it's sorta still like a Random Access Spinning Disk in ways. When it's nearing full, the free spaces that it has to write things are all over the place. One would think that since it's RAM that wouldn't matter, but what it does is it makes files have a large number of discrete chunks that aren't large enough to take advantage of contiguous large buffer reads. When there are larger chunks, the kernel can pipeline them and read them together. It's sorta still fragmented. Clearing out some space so you have more like 100GB free will help. My laptop totally gets a bit slower when my SSD is near full capacity. I move a bunch of stuff onto my desktop fileserver and things speed up. It sorta doesn't make sense given the idea of SSDs, but yeah, there's still some deep magic going on in there.
Disable all of those auto-start things, free up some SSD space. I don't do Windows so can't really help there.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:24 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
But yeah, 16GB should be enough if you kill off the "OMG start everything all the time" things. But also a bit yep on the only 29GB out of 1TB is very likely your slowdown. The SSD is fine and dandy, but it's sorta still like a Random Access Spinning Disk in ways. When it's nearing full, the free spaces that it has to write things are all over the place. One would think that since it's RAM that wouldn't matter, but what it does is it makes files have a large number of discrete chunks that aren't large enough to take advantage of contiguous large buffer reads. When there are larger chunks, the kernel can pipeline them and read them together. It's sorta still fragmented. Clearing out some space so you have more like 100GB free will help. My laptop totally gets a bit slower when my SSD is near full capacity. I move a bunch of stuff onto my desktop fileserver and things speed up. It sorta doesn't make sense given the idea of SSDs, but yeah, there's still some deep magic going on in there.
Disable all of those auto-start things, free up some SSD space. I don't do Windows so can't really help there.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:24 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Just googling, it appears the 9560 came with a choice of "1TB HDD + 32GB Flash with Intel® Smart Response Technology" or "1TB PCIe SSD", it'd be useful to know which yours has.
You can get a portable external USB drive big enough to hold all your movies for about $50-$100; try copying them off and freeing up the space on your internal drive.
posted by bfields at 10:56 AM on September 15, 2022
You can get a portable external USB drive big enough to hold all your movies for about $50-$100; try copying them off and freeing up the space on your internal drive.
posted by bfields at 10:56 AM on September 15, 2022
1TB hard drive, that only has 29gigs left
Run Disk Cleanup, then try moving some of your movies onto an external drive (or delete some that you don't want) to get about 100gb free and see if that helps. Conventional wisdom is that HDDs need some free space for operational overhead.
If it were me I'd install an SSD and do a clean install of Windows, but that can be fraught with frustration on a machine with the maker's version of the OS. You'd either need a recovery option that would let you install Dell's OS version and drivers (and bloatware no doubt) to a new drive, or you'd need a clean version of the OS and install it and then hunt down all the drivers you'd need. Definitely beyond the scope of an AskMe, there are so many things that can come up at every point of the journey. I would not recommend this unless you've done it before once or twice, and even then it can be frustrating.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:29 AM on September 15, 2022
Run Disk Cleanup, then try moving some of your movies onto an external drive (or delete some that you don't want) to get about 100gb free and see if that helps. Conventional wisdom is that HDDs need some free space for operational overhead.
If it were me I'd install an SSD and do a clean install of Windows, but that can be fraught with frustration on a machine with the maker's version of the OS. You'd either need a recovery option that would let you install Dell's OS version and drivers (and bloatware no doubt) to a new drive, or you'd need a clean version of the OS and install it and then hunt down all the drivers you'd need. Definitely beyond the scope of an AskMe, there are so many things that can come up at every point of the journey. I would not recommend this unless you've done it before once or twice, and even then it can be frustrating.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:29 AM on September 15, 2022
If you offload your video from your working disk then that sounds like it would improve your free disk space and, by extension, your computer's performance.
USB sticks are ridiculously cheap nowadays, and some are very low profile (meaning insert and forget, since they don't stick out enough to get bashed), but also quite slow - you would be able to play video from it, but copying video on to it can be a bit of a pain.
SSDs are a more unwieldy and more expensive, but much much faster if you find one with a USB-C connector (I assume from laptop age that your laptop has one). They are too annoying to leave attached while moving the laptop, speaking personally, but I use one for my backups and the performance is so good I can't tell when a backup is running.
Another external storage option if your laptop has any sort of SD card slot is an SD card. They run at a similar rate to USB sticks, but you can insert a card and leave it there permanently, particularly if it's a micro SD slot and the card goes in flush with the side of the laptop (full size slots often leave half the card sticking out, so check that first).
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 1:55 PM on September 15, 2022
USB sticks are ridiculously cheap nowadays, and some are very low profile (meaning insert and forget, since they don't stick out enough to get bashed), but also quite slow - you would be able to play video from it, but copying video on to it can be a bit of a pain.
SSDs are a more unwieldy and more expensive, but much much faster if you find one with a USB-C connector (I assume from laptop age that your laptop has one). They are too annoying to leave attached while moving the laptop, speaking personally, but I use one for my backups and the performance is so good I can't tell when a backup is running.
Another external storage option if your laptop has any sort of SD card slot is an SD card. They run at a similar rate to USB sticks, but you can insert a card and leave it there permanently, particularly if it's a micro SD slot and the card goes in flush with the side of the laptop (full size slots often leave half the card sticking out, so check that first).
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 1:55 PM on September 15, 2022
According to this article on a Dell forum, you can have two drives - one an M.2 drive and one a 2.5" drive. You could install the M.2 drive in the M.2 slot and use the vendor's utility software to copy your current hard drive to it, then make sure the M.2 drive is the C: drive, reboot the machine, and reformat the hard drive; then copy the 'data' libraries (on Windows, things like 'Documents', 'Pictures', 'Music' etc) to the old hard drive (as D:) and change the properties of the libraries to point to those directories, and delete the ones on the C: drive. This will leave you with software booting from the C: drive and your media and documents on the D: drive.
Optional step, instead of reformatting the hard drive for D: replace it with a 2.5" SSD of the same size.
Nthing the idea of putting your movies on an external drive (hard drive _or_ SSD), for perhaps a different reason. Many new "smart" TVs and Roku devices (including Roku TVs) can play media from USB drives so if someday you have one of those devices, it'll be a simple "plug and play" situation.
posted by TimHare at 2:19 PM on September 15, 2022
Optional step, instead of reformatting the hard drive for D: replace it with a 2.5" SSD of the same size.
Nthing the idea of putting your movies on an external drive (hard drive _or_ SSD), for perhaps a different reason. Many new "smart" TVs and Roku devices (including Roku TVs) can play media from USB drives so if someday you have one of those devices, it'll be a simple "plug and play" situation.
posted by TimHare at 2:19 PM on September 15, 2022
In addition to the RAM and SSD suggestions above, I would also recommend cleaning the cooling vents. If you're comfortable opening up the laptop to access the fans themselves (usually a somewhat delicate operation), that's best. If not, give them a good vacuum, perhaps paired with a gentle brush to help loosen dust bunnies.
Laptops in particular will apply "thermal throttling", when the CPU/GPU gets too hot, it will reduce power/clock speeds on those devices to reduce their thermal output, at the cost of speed. If your cooling vents are very clogged, your laptop may always be running hot, and so, artificially speed-limited.
posted by xedrik at 7:45 AM on September 17, 2022
Laptops in particular will apply "thermal throttling", when the CPU/GPU gets too hot, it will reduce power/clock speeds on those devices to reduce their thermal output, at the cost of speed. If your cooling vents are very clogged, your laptop may always be running hot, and so, artificially speed-limited.
posted by xedrik at 7:45 AM on September 17, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
First I'd upgrade the RAM and see if that solves it. Find out how much you have by following these instructions: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-check-your-computer-full-specifications-windows-10
Then go here to find the kind of ram you can get for this laptop: https://www.crucial.com/store/crucial-advisor-trust
Get double the RAM you have now (unless you're already at the max, which is unlikely).
You're in luck, unlike a lot of laptops from the past 10 years, It looks like that laptop has upgradeable RAM. I even found a video showing how to do it. It's a pretty simple process, hard to get things wrong, that just about anyone can do if you have the right tools (the hardest part will the the Torx #5 screwdriver).
I'd see if that improves things, and then look into putting in a faster SSD.
Doing "reset my pc" or re-installing might also help, especially if you have cruft software that's built up on the system over the years, running in the background. But I'd also only bother with that if the RAM upgrade did not improve matters.
posted by dis_integration at 8:49 AM on September 15, 2022 [2 favorites]