> Now I'm stuck with a $1500 Asus laptop that barely plays Netflix a year and a half later. despite an 7th gen i7 and 16gb of DDR4.

Any idea what's wrong with it?

Maybe he has a spinning disk in it? I see lots of laptops in that price range that go for the 1TB HDD instead of the 256GB SSD. Windows 10 on a 5400RPM HDD is pretty miserable these days, the OS just can't stop touching the disk and it's forever IO bound.

I've had the same problem. I had a i7 T420 with 16GB of RAM that was lightning quick when I got it and over a few years became completely unusable even for basic tasks. When I hit the Windows key to open the start menu, I could turn and take a sip of coffee before it opened. Reformatting and reinstalling from scratch did nothing to improve the speed.

I switched to a Macbook soon after and it is just as fast today as it was when I got it four years ago. I recently fired up that old T420 and popped an older, unused SSD into it. Instant game-changer. It is unbelievable how much faster it is with an SSD, the same speed it was with Windows 7 when I first got it.

Seriously, get an SSD.

Still doesn't seem right. with an SSD it's only as fast as Windows 7 on a rotating HDD?

Hitting the Windows key on Windows 7 even with an HDD was instant. Hitting the Windows key on Windows 10 with an HDD tok seconds. Installing an SSD brought it back to being instant.

Hard to get much faster than instant.

Does it have anything to do with Win10 start menu want's to download an ad to show you?

It's no longer bottlenecked on the disk IO presumably.

Yeah I mean a machine like that should be able to run web apps with no problems...

Does it have a SSD in it? Unfortunately some manufacturers like to spec out everything except a SSD. If it doesn’t, and especially if they stuck you with a hybrid drive (ugh), upgrade to a SSD and it should perform well again. It will certainly be an order of magnitude cheaper than a new laptop, too.

Check for thermal throttling. Dust can severely slow down a laptop, even though task manager says that it is only using 10% of the CPU.

Why does it barely play Netflix? Why would a Macbook be better?

That makes sense, I guess Netflix won't choose a video quality/resolution to play back based on your processing power but rather just on your network bandwidth

Like others said, what?

Anything unique about it? Are you running Windows 10? Latest updates? Need any driver updates? (Most drivers are updated by Windows but a few, like graphics/network sometimes benefit from checking yourself.)

Are you running a (really) resource intensive anti-virus program?

I own an $800 Asus gaming laptop and a $700 Asus ultrabook. One with 7th gen i7 and 16GB DDR. The other with 8th gen i7 and 16GB DDR. One has SATA SSD and other NVMe SSD. One is 1 year old. The other is 2 years old.

Both of them can run Visual Studio Professional, VS Code, Netflix, Hulu, StarCraft 2. Both are very fast and a joy to use. One is heavy; the other is light!

If it has a 5400 rpm hard drive, consider getting a 2.5" SSD to replace it, and use software to clone the drive. (Although it kind of sounds like you could use a fresh install.)

I guess "hacker" doesn't really mean what it used to mean. I thought it used to mean people who are curious and like to tinker. Maybe it now means "busy people who have no time to actually tinker but like the idea of tinkering".

From this long discussion a couple of months ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415185 ), this comment is about fans spinning up:

in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process [..]

This could also apply to thermal throttling of the CPU. Imagine if your laptop is on that edge, with some dust in the heatsinks and fans, then a can of compressed air and an install of ThrottleStop (or other software) to underclock a little and reduce the maximum boost frequency, and thereby reduce thermal throttling, might make it run smoother and faster-on-average.

Or another possibility:

If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.

If you NetFlix from Chrome, that might be worth a try, or upgrade/downgrade display drivers for testing. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415775 )

An i7 that could stream video, should still be able to stream video. If it can't, something has gone wrong, and should be traceable and fixable.

Same here. Replaced my MacBook Pro with an X1 Carbon last summer. Short circuiting my usual 2-year upgrade cycle and buying whatever Apple releases this fall.

Sorry to say, but you should have bought a Dell or Lenovo. -- On the other hand I think something is wrong with your Asus, this can't be.

Bizzare, my $800 Asus from 2013 still plays Netflix just fine. But I did swap in an SSD and replaced the battery once.

I'd have tried a Dell XPS or Surface Pro.