• Don_Dickle@lemmy.worldOP
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    13 days ago

    A little bit slow and takes forever to download hospital programs and stuff. Been thinking about it for years and saw the HP Essential and thought it my work. I don’t play games I just watch tv and movies.

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      might want to consider a reinstall of the OS first, or some linux if you are up to it.

    • BangersAndMash@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.

      I also back what everyone else is saying. Unless of course you can update your current laptop. What have you got? An extra stick of ram and an SSD can make an old laptop feel brand new, especially with an OS reinstall

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        12 days ago

        A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.

        I struggle to make sense of this. Most obviously, network cards have gotten better with time. It obviously depends on what you’re coming from and what you’re changing to, but of course a laptop upgrade could make your downloads faster?

        • BangersAndMash@lemmy.world
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          12 days ago

          The bandwidth of a network card would generally outclass your internet connection by an order of magnitude.

          Gigabits per second network cards have been standard for at least a decade.

          And then there’s your wifi too, if applicable, but even that is much faster than your general internet connection, unless you’re far from your router. A new laptop might help you get a better wifi signal, if it had a newer wifi protocol or stronger radio, but that’s also going to depend on your router.

          But in front of all of that is going to be your modem. Depending on the quality of your modem that might be a bottleneck.

          • cabbage@piefed.social
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            12 days ago

            I feel like I can download files to my newest laptop faster than I can move them around locally on my older ones. But maybe I’m just getting old, and my reference points are dates. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s also likely.

            In either case, thanks for the explanation!

            • BangersAndMash@lemmy.world
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              12 days ago

              Is it possible the hard drive is failing in the old one? I don’t know what the operating system would do if download speed surpassed write speed, but once it couldn’t hold it in ram any longer waiting to write I guess it would have to throttle it.