Question Why My Laptop Performance Is Slow?

[xBHSx]

Hello,
So i bought a new laptop a couple of years ago, it was a DELL 5521 but later on i bought a used laptop LENOVO X240.
The problem is that the LENOVO X240 is better spec wise, but still it performs slower then my DELL 5521, I tried installing different Windows OS but still it performs slow.
Can someone tell me why?

And also i was planning to upgrade my LENOVO X240, like add 8GB RAM and replace HDD with an SSD would that help with the performance?

DELL 5521 Specs:
-------------------------------------------
CPU: i3 3227U 1.90Ghz 3rd Gen
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600mhz
iGPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000
HDD: 500GB 5400rpm
OS: Windows 8.1 x64
RESOLUTION: 1336x768
DISPLAY: 15.6 inch


LENOVO X240 Specs:
-------------------------------------------
CPU: i5 4300U 1.90Ghz - 2.50Ghz 4th Gen
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600mhz
iGPU: Intel HD Graphics 4400
HDD: 500GB 5400rpm
OS: Windows 8.1 x64
RESOLUTION: 1336x768
DISPLAY: 12.5 inch

 

[Ralston18]

Hopefully the Lenovo's i5 CPU would perform faster than the Dell's i3. But there are other differences and factors to take into account.

The i5 may be faster per se but the entire laptop is being "held back" by something else. A bottleneck of some sort.

On both laptops use Task Manager and Resource Monitor to observe system performance. Just use only one at at time - not both together.

You should be able to note what resources are being used, what is using any given resource, and to what extent (%).

Both systems are likely being held back by the 4 GB RAM and slow HDD's.

How full are the HDD's? Should be around 70-80% at most. If higher you may need to do some disk cleaning to remove unused apps, old data, etc..

[NOTE: Be sure to back up all data and verify that the data is both recoverable and readable before doing any drive cleaning].

Adding/increasing RAM and changing to SSD's (minimum 256 GB) will likely improve performance.

Consider moving to Windows 10. Windows 8.1 may be an issue as well.

 

[HOLDMYPC]

Definitely the RAM and hard disk, my dear fellow, chances of your processor being the bottleneck here are remote, its likely the 4GB RAM and hard disks are traditionally slow so get it replaced with a decent ssd wouldn cost you more than 100$ to replace HDD(with 240GB ssd) and add 4GB ram