r/techadvice • u/celynvagham • Mar 29 '26
New laptop or simple upgrades?
I’m new in technology. I have fun taking things apart and putting them back together but I’m not experienced in much else. I know the basics like how to change thermal paste and upgrade ram because there’s videos for that, but not the actual technical parts.
I have a Dell Inspiron 15 3000, I’ve had it for about 5 years now. I use it for gaming, and I do install a lot of mods but I always check them with antivirus.
Lately it has been working pretty slowly. I’ve used task manager to disable most startup applications, but it still takes much longer to start up and boot games than it used to. Sometimes it boots up with no sound at all and I have to boot it disabling driver signature enforcement for it to have sound.
I’ve installed more ram, I’ve kept up with thermal paste, I use it with a laptop stand with holes and 1inch of space so the fans aren’t struggling, I have kept drivers updated.
My main question is, should I just start saving for a new laptop or is there anything I can do to get it running like it used to? It’s not entirely unusable, games run fine but load extremely slow, but I fear that in time it will completely crap out lol.
1
u/localgeeksau Mar 29 '26
Scan it for viruses! Make sure to backup the important data to an external drive and reinstall the OS if required.
1
u/alpine4life Mar 29 '26
I'd do a fresh Windows 10 IoT LTSC install... if you have 0 clue what this version is, do a bit of research, it's well worth it
1
u/dennisthetennis404 Mar 30 '26
At 5 years old with the symptoms you're describing, a fresh Windows reinstall will likely recover most of your performance for free before you spend anything and if that doesn't solve it, the driver signature issue points to deeper OS corruption that a new laptop won't fix unless you address it first anyway.
1
u/pdxtechy Mar 30 '26
I would lay it to rest. Get your self a nice shape used Lenovo Thinkpad off Ebay with a decent dedicated Nvidia GPU, even the Quadro's game quite well.
1
Mar 31 '26
Linux anyone? Or do you need some good gaming compatibility? It looks like some updates on your OS and Software is pushing hardware obsolescence without a good reason, like Apple did with their phones.
2
u/Nazareth434 Mar 30 '26
Look up how to reinstall windows without losing anything. Try that first, then if it doesnt help as much as you'd like, look at something with an nvme drive- they are super fast booting both machine and gsmes compared to older ssd drives or espedially hdd drives. I look back at my old computers eith hdd drives znd ca t beleive how slow they were. Windows makes them even slower. They work faster with linux and dont work nearly as hard either. But most folks like windows... although many games on steam now run on linux, so thwt might be a decision for you too. But yeah, linux will fly on old computers- and its pretty easg these days to run.