AMD A10-8700P APU Laptop Upgrade Advice

[jonesy991]

I have a HP Pavillion 15 AMD A10-8700p laptop and it is pretty slow at the moment. Looking to upgrade some of the components because it is only a year old and need some advice on what would give best speed boost. It takes forever to boot up and most programs take a couple of minutes to start. No malware or viruses and all startup programs are disabled. It also seems to get hot to touch below the keyboard when browsing internet or using Word etc. which I would not expect.

It has single channel DDR3 8GB RAM with 2TB HDD running Windows 10. Wondering if upgrading to dual channel RAM would be better (I have heard APU's require dual channel to run at full capacity) than SSD or any other ideas to speed up this laptop (I was told by sales people it was comparable to i5 - obviously not and I should have done my research)

Thankyou for your help
Sam

 

[Ecky]

An SSD would help tremendously. Get an M.2 drive if your board has a slot for it.

Dual channel RAM will help in gaming and tasks like compression, but probably not in normal desktop usage. Make sure your laptop even has 2 RAM slots; it's very common for OEMs to cripple AMD systems with only a single RAM slot. You can read all about it here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10000/who-controls-user-experience-amd-carrizo-thoroughly-tested

 

[jonesy991]

An SSD would help tremendously. Get an M.2 drive if your board has a slot for it.

Dual channel RAM will help in gaming and tasks like compression, but probably not in normal desktop usage. Make sure your laptop even has 2 RAM slots; it's very common for OEMs to cripple AMD systems with only a single RAM slot. You can read all about it here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10000/who-controls-user-experience-amd-carrizo-thoroughly-tested

Thanks for your reply! My laptop fortunately does have 2 memory slots - HP decided to use just one of them. I have been looking for SSD's for sometimes and have been recommended this one by others https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00P73B1E4/ref=twister_B013ZJ4EWC?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 What do you think? Also how can I find out if my board has a slot for an M.2 drive.

 

[Ecky]

Samsung's 850 EVO is a great drive. You might also look into Intel's offerings.

The best way to find out if your laptop has an M.2 slot is to open it up and look, chances are not good that anyone has posted about it online. Most modern Intel laptops do, but I don't see too many with AMD chips in them.