I'm in the same situation. The laptop I bought in 2013 ended up being faster than the one I bought just a few months ago.
Not only that, modern laptops do not have removable batteries, and often the memory is not upgradable. Just stick with what you have.

Bump your RAM to at least 8GB and if you don';t have an SSD already, get one. SSD alone will be the best upgrade you could get.

Also you're probably comparing your laptop to ultrabooks with ULV (ultra low voltage) processors, which are dual core. Different audience.

If you do plan on keeping your Sandy bridge era laptop, which is certainly still very much usable, clean out the fan+ heatsink and redo the thermal paste on the processor (and GPU if it has a dGPU).

A clean install of Windows will probably do wonders.

You can even upgrade to Windows 10 for free.

What I do when I upgrade is back up the files I need, do the upgrade, verify that it has activated, then go to the MS media creation website and have it make a bootable USB stick.. You can also download an ISO and burn it.

After that I do a clean install of Windows 10 from the bootable media. You don't need a key after doing the Windows 10 upgrade as it uses some sort of hardware ID on the Microsoft servers. When doing the clean install
you just skip the part where it asks for a key and then once you are connected to the internet it will auto activate.

Site to do the free upgrade from:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility … indows10upgrade

Media creation site:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

And as another user has recommended.. Get an SSD if you don't have one already. The i7-2720QM is no slouch and is absolutely fine for the foreseeable future for regular tasks.

Redoing the thermal paste and cleaning out the dust is also very good advice.

Thanks for all the great replies. I upgraded to a Samsung EVO SSD about a year ago, and it made a nice difference. I will investigate going up to 8GB of RAM. Assuming that >8GB is not necessary?

I did a clean install of the OS at that time and imaged the disk at that point, so I may reimage soon to see if it makes a difference.

I may buy another SSD just to upgrade to Windows 10 to play around with it. Or is it not "allowed" by Microsoft to have two different HDDs, one with Win 7 and the other with Win 10?

Last resort would be reapplying the thermal paste just because I'm not confident that I could put the machine back together again! But I did blow out the dust last year through the vents, and doing so made a HUGE difference in how often the fan engaged.

I rather like this laptop, and I bought the i7-2720QM just to future proof a little. Looks like that time is here.

boxpressed wrote:

Thanks for all the great replies. I upgraded to a Samsung EVO SSD about a year ago, and it made a nice difference. I will invest […]
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Thanks for all the great replies. I upgraded to a Samsung EVO SSD about a year ago, and it made a nice difference. I will investigate going up to 8GB of RAM. Assuming that >8GB is not necessary?

I did a clean install of the OS at that time and imaged the disk at that point, so I may reimage soon to see if it makes a difference.

I may buy another SSD just to upgrade to Windows 10 to play around with it. Or is it not "allowed" by Microsoft to have two different HDDs, one with Win 7 and the other with Win 10?

Last resort would be reapplying the thermal paste just because I'm not confident that I could put the machine back together again! But I did blow out the dust last year through the vents, and doing so made a HUGE difference in how often the fan engaged.

I rather like this laptop, and I bought the i7-2720QM just to future proof a little. Looks like that time is here.

I don't think going from 6GB to 8GB will make any difference considering you've got the SSD (and one of the faster ones to boot). The only thing that might help, is if your current RAM config is not running in dual channel mode, then maybe an upgrade to 8GB will enable that and give a tiny improvement.

What GPU? That might make a difference. Check for driver updates, check for clock speed settings in BIOS that might be bumped up, check how much RAM is given to it, etc.

If you do try to reapply thermal paste, try to find a disassembly video on youtube of your model and watch it over and over. It will make a huge difference in confidence and reduce the odds of breaking retention clips, etc.

This dv7t has an interesting GPU setup. It has a discrete Radeon 6770M and can switch to the integrated Intel HD graphics to save power. The problem is that HP stopped releasing driver updates in November 2011.

This dual GPU setup is an odd beast that makes updating drivers pretty tricky. I can use the AMD/ATI reference driver, but doing so sometimes kills the ability to switch between the two GPUs. But I think I should do something since these drivers are almost 6 years old!

I do not know about AMD, but for the GPUs that I write drivers for, the company does release speed improvements (as well as new features) for old GPUs as well. So in essence it is worth getting driver updates even for older GPUs as sometimes they do bring performance improvements. Yes there is proof to the contrary but that is probably due to different companies changing their entire driver infrastructure in new drivers therefore screwing up old GPUs. Again, not naming names.

Thankfully, there is someone updating AMD/Intel drivers for laptops (at least through 2016): http://leshcatlabs.net/

Once I get everything backed up good and proper, I'll test these out. I'm hopeful that newer drivers will make a noticeable difference because webpages are the only things that are sluggish (I don't really play games on this computer, which is probably why I didn't upgrade sooner).

So I have 2 modern laptops. A Dell XPS 13 9350, Skylake i5-6500U (Windows 10) and a Lenovo Thinkpad T430S, IvyBridge i5-3220M (Ubuntu 16.04). I bought the Dell XPS refurb'ed (1 year warranty) for $550 and the Lenovo for around $200 off eBay within a few months of each other.

CPU\s themselves benchmark approximately the same, i5-6500U has slight lead. Main difference is that the Ivy is 35W and the SKL is 15W. So my Dell XPS has way longer battery life (platform power is also down quite a bit). We're talking 10+ hours vs ~4 hours with wifi web browsing. Since the i5-6500U has hybrid H265, watching VP9 videos off Youtube, it just demolishes the Lenovo there. H264, VP8 videos is about the same 2-3:1 battery life lead. XPS also has NVME storage, so it feels much snappier.

So basically, the Dell XPS is slightly more powerful, almost half the weight, 3X the battery life, and about 3X the storage performance, and much quieter due to less thermal issues.

You should be comparing against a 35/45W Kaby/CannonLake i7-HQ series (quad). Thermals are extremely important, because laptops nowadays can keep turbo up longer. Canned benchmarks that last 15 minutes do not appropriately reflect this.

Buying laptops nowadays is about buying the whole platform improvements than it is about the CPU. I recommend looking at Dave2D (youtube) for some laptop review videos. Too many reviews these days are focused on CPU/Video card rather than on the daily annoyances like keyboard/trackpad quality, thermals, and overall design. Laptops have come a long way since 2013.

dexvx wrote:

So I have 2 modern laptops. A Dell XPS 13 9350, Skylake i5-6500U (Windows 10) and a Lenovo Thinkpad T430S, IvyBridge i5-3220M (U […]
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So I have 2 modern laptops. A Dell XPS 13 9350, Skylake i5-6500U (Windows 10) and a Lenovo Thinkpad T430S, IvyBridge i5-3220M (Ubuntu 16.04). I bought the Dell XPS refurb'ed (1 year warranty) for $550 and the Lenovo for around $200 off eBay within a few months of each other.

CPU\s themselves benchmark approximately the same, i5-6500U has slight lead. Main difference is that the Ivy is 35W and the SKL is 15W. So my Dell XPS has way longer battery life (platform power is also down quite a bit). We're talking 10+ hours vs ~4 hours with wifi web browsing. Since the i5-6500U has hybrid H265, watching VP9 videos off Youtube, it just demolishes the Lenovo there. H264, VP8 videos is about the same 2-3:1 battery life lead. XPS also has NVME storage, so it feels much snappier.

So basically, the Dell XPS is slightly more powerful, almost half the weight, 3X the battery life, and about 3X the storage performance, and much quieter due to less thermal issues.

You should be comparing against a 35/45W Kaby/CannonLake i7-HQ series (quad). Thermals are extremely important, because laptops nowadays can keep turbo up longer. Canned benchmarks that last 15 minutes do not appropriately reflect this.

Buying laptops nowadays is about buying the whole platform improvements than it is about the CPU. I recommend looking at Dave2D (youtube) for some laptop review videos. Too many reviews these days are focused on CPU/Video card rather than on the daily annoyances like keyboard/trackpad quality, thermals, and overall design. Laptops have come a long way since 2013.

Very helpful, thank you! The best Kaby Lake mobile CPU scores 9961. I'm eager to learn the results of the upgraded video driver, and then I'll decide whether I'm in the market for a replacement.

boxpressed wrote:

webpages are the only things that are sluggish

Did you try another browser, or better, disabling JavaScript?
A lot of the modern web wastes a lot of CPU power with its wanton use of JavaScript for ads and useless features.

Yes, I've used Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. I hadn't been updating Java for years and finally just uninstalled it to see if doing so made any difference. Not really. I found that an ad blocker helps a lot on some pages.

I really only use this computer for web browsing, word processing, and a few others non-intensive tasks. I don't really play games, and when I do, they're retro games on another computer.

JavaScript isn't Java. It's what practically all web pages use for their dynamic and logic parts.

I don't know about new Opera, but in classic Opera (version 12) you can disable/enable JavaScript on the fly, without reloading the page, which is very useful.
Maybe Vivaldi has a similar option, but I'm not sure if it toggles dynamically.
In Firefox I couldn't find an extension to toggle it dynamically, but maybe things have changed since I looked.

Ad blockers help because a lot of ads abuse JavaScript. I prefer to leave ads on, but I do manually add to my block list URLs of JavaScript components of ads that affect performance or that animate.

Ah, thank you. I didn't know the difference. I will try that.

also FYI going by passmark scores alone to compare processors is not really that great of an idea....

boxpressed wrote:

Very helpful, thank you! The best Kaby Lake mobile CPU scores 9961. I'm eager to learn the results of the upgraded video driver, and then I'll decide whether I'm in the market for a replacement.

Yea, forgot about that. GPU improvement from Kaby to Sandy is literally like 5X. Kaby has full HW H265 support (SKL was hybrid). So you get incredibly longer battery life watching H265/VP9 videos.

Also, use Edge. Has longer battery life. Also one of the few browsers that can stream 1080p/4K in Netflix (Chrome/FF can't). Which brings another annoyance. Movie studies require ReadyPlay 3.0 (DRM) for many 4K streaming. So you need a KabyLake or newer to stream 4K from Netflix.

dexvx wrote:

Also, use Edge. Has longer battery life. Also one of the few browsers that can stream 1080p/4K in Netflix (Chrome/FF can't). Which brings another annoyance. Movie studies require ReadyPlay 3.0 (DRM) for many 4K streaming. So you need a KabyLake or newer to stream 4K from Netflix.

Nvidia supports 4K Netflix streaming on its Pascal based GPUs.
http://techreport.com/news/32195/nvidia-384-7 … tflix-on-pascal.

The Netflix app also supports UHD streaming, plus it can do 5.1. Edge is limited to stereo.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Nvidia supports 4K Netflix streaming on its Pascal based GPUs. http://techreport.com/news/32195/nvidia-384-7 … tflix-on-pascal. […]
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dexvx wrote:

Also, use Edge. Has longer battery life. Also one of the few browsers that can stream 1080p/4K in Netflix (Chrome/FF can't). Which brings another annoyance. Movie studies require ReadyPlay 3.0 (DRM) for many 4K streaming. So you need a KabyLake or newer to stream 4K from Netflix.

Nvidia supports 4K Netflix streaming on its Pascal based GPUs.
http://techreport.com/news/32195/nvidia-384-7 … tflix-on-pascal.

The Netflix app also supports UHD streaming, plus it can do 5.1. Edge is limited to stereo.

Edge should be able to do 5.1.

Point is that the other browsers don't do it. So if you don't want to use the Netflix app (for some reason, lots of people are upset about making a MS account to get apps due to privacy, but have no problems giving everything to Google), Edge is the only way.

I try to remember to install the H264ify extensions in Chrome and Firefox. I find it irritating that VP9 is often used by default on machines without acceleration for it. That shouldn't be happening IMO.