Spectre x360 13-ae012dx 1-TB 16GB Extremly slow

[Michael_in_FL]

Since August 2021, my Spectre x360 13-ae012dx has been incredibly slow.  A couple moths after this happened, I replaced the ssd and reinstalled windows using HP restore and haven't installed the majority of additional software that I need to actually use this computer.  I've tried every diagnostic provided by HP and nothing shows failure.  With many simple things taking more that 5 seconds, at times more than a minute, and sometimes failing to run at all, my laptop is almost unusable.  I'm fairly convinced I have either a cpu problem or a memory issue.  With the HP cpu testor and the Intel cpu tester, there are no failures.  Also with microsoft memory tester, no errors there either.  What's wrong with all of these is none test the speed of the processing they only confirm delivery/reception of data.  To confirm this,  I run an online speed test.  My laptop ranks at the bottom of those who have tested their system, even below systems with less memory and Intel i series ... mine is Intel i7, 1-TB (upgraded from 512), 16GB memory.

Q1. Apart from paying for HP diagnostics with sending it to support, what other things would anyone suggest to help me figure what's wrong?

Q2. One thing I was thinking was to buying new memory cards since they are relatively inexpensive (2 x 8GB DDR3).  Can I upgrade to 32GB memory (2 x 16GB DDR3)?  If it fixes the problem then I have more memory 🙂 ... but if it doesn't I can return them.

Thanks in advance for reading my post and posting any suggestions you may have. 🙂

[Michael_in_FL]

I just found that this laptop can't have the memory upgraded ... so that idea is out.

[pbroussard]

The first 2 things to check out that just takes a little time are:

CLean out the fan thoroughly. If it's getting hot, the cpu speed will throttle down.

Second, I would boot into bios to diagnostics and select the memory test, and select the option to run until error. This is done best right before you retire for the night.

I personally would rather a boot disc with MemTest on it, that utility runs I think 7 different tests on the memory and can be selected to loop also. If there are errors in your memory, that will find it.