04-03-2023, 09:40 AM
I know you've more or less decided an outcome, but there are a couple of things you can investigate:
- because this is a laptop you might want to check the power saving settings (many defaults are to maximise runtime when on battery but perform a bit better when connected to line power).
- sort of related to the previous point, but check the CPU scheduler settings to make sure that the clock frequency is ramped up quickly (I've encountered this on a non-x86 platform but I've not seen similar on x86 platforms so this is fairly unlikely).
- you might want to check whether the fan/heatsink is clogged with dust etc too - fan activity like you report suggests the CPU might be thermally throttling which wouldn't help performance. Perhaps the thermal paste between CPU and heatsink has broken down and needs replacing.
I've a number of older machines and I've not encountered a Linux installation that didn't perform at least as well as Windows, especially running from an SSD, hardware problems notwithstanding. While I've not had any Dell laptops their hardware is usually not too bad.
- because this is a laptop you might want to check the power saving settings (many defaults are to maximise runtime when on battery but perform a bit better when connected to line power).
- sort of related to the previous point, but check the CPU scheduler settings to make sure that the clock frequency is ramped up quickly (I've encountered this on a non-x86 platform but I've not seen similar on x86 platforms so this is fairly unlikely).
- you might want to check whether the fan/heatsink is clogged with dust etc too - fan activity like you report suggests the CPU might be thermally throttling which wouldn't help performance. Perhaps the thermal paste between CPU and heatsink has broken down and needs replacing.
I've a number of older machines and I've not encountered a Linux installation that didn't perform at least as well as Windows, especially running from an SSD, hardware problems notwithstanding. While I've not had any Dell laptops their hardware is usually not too bad.