Old budget laptop upgraded from Win8 to 10: questions

[On2wheels]

I finally took the plunge and upgraded this old laptop my mom uses to Win10. I let it choose the version of 10 (Home) and it self-activated fine, left all settings at default, and finished the setup. I disabled background apps from running and sending telemetry. The laptop always had issues with wifi in Win8 so I left the wifi disabled in the bios and just use ethernet now.

I remember on Windows 8 the pc would go virtually silent when it wasn't being used, mind you I disabled real-time virus checking because it dogged the system too much. So I thought it's better to be safe especially when it's not my PC so I updated it to 10. But now when it's sitting idle, even after long periods, I can easily hear a fan running inside all the time. I get that it has Defender running full time now and you can't easily disable that but I'm wondering if there's something I can do or that I've forgotten to setup that is keeping the cpu under enough load to trigger that fan. Does anyone have ideas on something I can check that could cause extra cpu load on a low end laptop?

I made sure it wasn't checking for updates, and even paused real time virus scanning but it still runs the fan. It's a Lenovo N580.

 

[Marzipan]

open the task manager n let it sit a bit and take a look at what going on that appears to be taxing the CPU when it's supposed to be idle.

 

[sswilson]

Older hardware also takes some time after an initial install to do the windows file indexing. I typically do the install and then let the device run (with sleep / power down disabled) overnight.

 

[djbrad]

You could go in the bios and enable silent mode in the cpu / fan / power section.

It won't fix the main problem, but will help.

Does the laptop at least got an ssd and 8gb ram?

Dual-core cpus does work hard in windows 10.

 

[JD]

Honestly I would say that laptop is simply too old and underpowered to run Windows 10. I'm surprised Windows 8 even worked decently. Not sure what specific specs it has, but it looks like it came with a dual-core Pentium Ivy Bridge CPU. Feels like something that should have shipped with Windows 7...

The 15.6" screen size is a bit harder to find cheap refurbished units, but as an example: https://ca.refurb.io/collections/re...z-16-gb-512-gb-ssd-windows-10-pro-refurbished plus $25 off, so $254. You'd still be stuck on Windows 10 though as Windows 11 isn't officially supported.

 

[Shadowmeph]

It is strange that just upgrading from win 8 to 10 would do this if it ran quiet before and wasn't too slow.
Does she close the lid on the laptop this would put it to sleep or if she only surfs the net does very basic things not doing this like Office you could just switch to Linux. but Win ten always has something running if you used something like Windows10Debloater which you need to ruin in Powershell i it has a few different scripts that you can run so that you can turn off everything the basic user doesn't use removes some things it cleans it up very decently I used it a few times you can find it on https://github.com

 

[On2wheels]

You could go in the bios and enable silent mode in the cpu / fan / power section.

It won't fix the main problem, but will help.

Does the laptop at least got an ssd and 8gb ram?

Dual-core cpus does work hard in windows 10.

It does not have SSD, that upgrade was my next step if this didn't work out too well, but surprisingly it does handle 10 ok, in fact not much slower than 8 was on it, if at all. It's one of those cases where the user is only checking email and light browsing, internet speed is the absolute minimum package that teksavvy offers. So where do I draw the line at putting money into it.

I will check the bios again but iirc it was very limited to what I Could change in there.
@JD it shipped with Win8 on it, and ran decently well. Back then we didn't know how good SSDs were. Or I didn't. What's the cheapest ssd I could buy for a laptop like this?

 

[On2wheels]

It is strange that just upgrading from win 8 to 10 would do this if it ran quiet before and wasn't too slow.
Does she close the lid on the laptop this would put it to sleep or if she only surfs the net does very basic things not doing this like Office you could just switch to Linux. but Win ten always has something running if you used something like Windows10Debloater which you need to ruin in Powershell i it has a few different scripts that you can run so that you can turn off everything the basic user doesn't use removes some things it cleans it up very decently I used it a few times you can find it on https://github.com

I forgot about a debloater. She does not close the lid, or at least I've never seen it closed, but I suppose I could enable sleep mode on it and let it be. I disabled sleep simply because the user is not PC savvy at all, and I don't know how consistent they are with closing the lid and leaving it closed.
For example, when I setup Firefox I forgot to enable the small google search box. So when I got home I had a phone call asking where to search google from!

 

[Izerous]

If it is actually a spinning rust laptop then you should be able to just swap in a 2.5in SSD and install windows again.

 

[JD]

It's $50-75 for a 500GB SSD from a reputable brand. How much RAM is in it?

The SSD might help slightly, but it's still a ~12yr old CPU. I'm guessing it struggles with loading some websites or streaming videos.