High memory and disk utilization

[Rince]

Hello,

I brought HP laptop 15s 6 months back from amazon India for my niece. She is in standard 7 and I thought the specs will be more than enough for her online classes and may be use of MS Office down the line. Its 4 GB RAM with 1 TB HDD. 

The issue is its has high memory usage around 80-85% and 100% disk. Just installed whatsapp on it. I never expected it to be that slow without much going on. Not really happy with the product though, I think product should be sold keeping in mind at least with a basic usage and not to have the user waste there time to figure whats wrong and then have to go with upgrading the resources. Anyway not sure whom to blame since multiple vendors are involved now-a-days but I feel HP gets a bad reputation.

So, what are the options I've got? Are there any way to improve the performance like running some diag tools or killing unwanted processes. If not the only option is to upgrade the resources then what are my options? As I mentioned before my niece usage will be to attend online classes using Google meet, MS Office, browsing etc 

Thanks for the support!   

[banhien]

@Rince 

Its specs

        https://support.hp.com/au-en/document/c06715802

Who knows what is your niece doing but I could say 3 things work together to make machine to slow down

1. I has 4GB of RAM but actually a lot less due to it has AMD Ryzen™ 3 3250U (2.6 GHz base clock, up to 3.5 GHz max boost clock, 1 MB L2 cache, 2 cores) therefore AMD Radeon™ Graphics takes away RAM as mentioned in

                    https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06526774

                    https://www.microsoft.com/playready/overview/

2. Because it only has small amount of RAM, it has to manage swap/page a lot

3. Therefore HDD has to work all the time and because HDD is slow therefore it spins itself to death

Now, adding more RAM and replace HDD using faster SSD would speed it up.

(a) RAM: You can use the following RAM (or similar):

                https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/ct2k8g4sfs824a/ct19216719

(b) SSD: You can use (or similar)

               https://cplonline.com.au/samsung-mz-76e1t0bw-1tb-860-evo-2-5-sata3-ssd.html

Please upgrade RAM first. You can also upgrade to 32GB using (or similar)

            https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/ct2k16g4sfd824a/ct19216680

Regards.

[Rince]

I know what my niece does with the laptop..!! and I've used many laptops before and din't have such experience. If the RAM/HDD combo doesn't match then its better to put the basic configuration that matches.

Anyway thanks for the recommendation.

Cheers

[Rince]

Just want to confirm can I upgrade to below one 8GB RAM so that I can have total of 12GB then.

https://www.amazon.in/Crucial-DDR4-Laptop-Memory-CT8G4SFRA266/dp/B08C56KXQJ/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keyw...

Thanks,

Rince