I thought the same thing. 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. Now I'm saving up for a Macbook Pro again, despite my hatred for the keyboard and touchbar.
Any idea what's wrong with it?
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.
Hard to get much faster than instant.
(TBH the same issue happens on a Mac though, except Safari instead of Edge).
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.)
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.