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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

Friend of mine bought Zephyrus G16 with Intel 185H and 32GB RAM. He thought this will help him studying and he chose it because some software he has to use is only available for Windows. He called me to have a look as the laptop has been sluggish for him.

This thing barely can handle Office, Teams and the browser. Hot, noisy as hell and performance wise I see no difference over laptops from decade ago. Tragic.

To be fair I don't think I could do anything. Task manager showed CPU as under utilised, yet fans were blasting, editing Word document looked like a slideshow.

ASUS tools showed no problems.

I don't know, feels like people are getting scammed with these new laptops.

I still have M1 Max and never experienced anything like this.

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Had something similar with my work laptop today. Lenovo X1 Carbon, couple of years old. Got reinstalled very recently.

Been fine, but suddenly it was slow af. Near zero CPU, GPU and disk usage in Windows Task Manager, but I could feel it was burning hot, which it wasn't just 15 minutes prior.

Did a reboot and all was fine again.

Surely some firmware that messed up, though no idea why.

Anyway, I'd start by removing crap, that goes for 3rd party anti-virus and vendor tools especially. Use something like Bulk Crap Uninstaller[1] or Revo[2], and then reinstall drivers.

Totally agreed on the sad state of laptops these days.

[1]: https://www.bcuninstaller.com/ (open source)

[2]: https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-fr...

What were the disk specs? HDD or SSD? GPU?

Windows is a heavy operating system compared to the others and can cause that problem but that likely isn't Windows alone causing the problem (though bloatware / other AV solutions could also have something to do with it)

1TB NVMe and 4060 GPU

Sounds a lot like a dedicated GPU is running and heat-throttling the whole thing, since you don't see CPU usage.

I wanted to say gaming laptops are a scam, but the older Intel MBPs with dedicated GPUs suffered too. More trouble than they're worth.

One thing I notice is that Google Drive was using 15% of ARC GPU (laptop also has nVidia 4060). When I shut down that process, it cooled down a bit after a while, but system is still sluggish and fans work all the time, even if I switched it to "Silent" mode.

Does it have an option to shut off the dGPU entirely and rely on integrated? Just as a test.

Uninstall all security except for Windows defender and see how it feels.

It's an Intel powered gaming laptop with discrete GPU running Windows. Of course it's gonna heat like crazy. But that box can also do things an M1 can't do. Like play games... And heat up a small room.

The discrete GPU is barely used, so it shouldn't be getting hot.

Yeah, that's the Intel part. They do that. AMD would have been much better although still not M1 cool.

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