Any of these laptops good?

[behzad]

I got a hand me down HP Pavilion 11t-n000 x360 with 4G memory. I ran a test with one of my clients website which has large pages compared to that of my older laptop Dell D630 with 4G of memory and the Dell had the upper hand of finishing the publishing more than 1.5 min.

Do you think if I add total of 8G to the HP, that it will speed things up on Xara? With other applications it has no problem, but with Xara it seems slow.

What hardware xara takes advantage of for web design.

[ss-kalm]

Which Windows versions are you running. I've heard that it takes 4GB just to run windows 10 efficiently. Although to be fair, I've heard (and read on the internet) a lot of thing that aren't correct!

[pauland]

I got a hand me down HP Pavilion 11t-n000 x360 with 4G memory. I ran a test with one of my clients website which has large pages compared to that of my older laptop Dell D630 with 4G of memory and the Dell had the upper hand of finishing the publishing more than 1.5 min.

Do you think if I add total of 8G to the HP, that it will speed things up on Xara? With other applications it has no problem, but with Xara it seems slow.

What hardware xara takes advantage of for web design.

Why are we re-running the thread that you already know about?

Two things matter to speeding up Xara software on a given machine - memory and an SSD Hard drive. 4GB isn't much these days.

[behzad]

Win 10, 64 bit. I get 2G free out of 4G for Xara. @paul I do not understand your assumption? I ask this because the way Xara works, I read somewhere it does not even use multi processing. Never hearts to learn more from you guys.

[pauland]

Win 10, 64 bit. I get 2G free out of 4G for Xara. @paul I do not understand your assumption? I ask this because the way Xara works, I read somewhere it does not even use multi processing. Never hearts to learn more from you guys.

behzad, you posted in another thread that it would continue here, but essentially everything you need to know was in that thread.

Essentially.. 4GB memory is low and Xara likes memory for big documents.
Xara likes SSDs - speed up just about everything significantly.
Xara doesn't use GPUs
Xara doesn't multi-thread enough to take advantage of fancy multi-core CPUs.

That's it really.

[behzad]

Perfect Paul, thank you for the info. I think I will upgrade the memory to 8G since it is cheap for the HP and work with that for a while. Since I am not doing any major photoshop or 3d work.

[behzad]

I am baffled. Here is the screen shot of stats as the file is being processed in xara (screen freezes). As you can see the power consumption is high and not the cpu usage. This is on the HP stats with 4G that I have described.
and memory screen shot while file being processed in xara.

[pauland]

Your CPU has four cores. You can only use one and a bit of those cores with Xara, so your CPU usage will always be low in comparison with the processing capability.

[pauland]

Behzad, I'd just like to add diagnosing performance bottlenecks isn't straight-forward. For example a program that required access to lots of data (images with Xara) can be prevented from working efficiently by a slow hard drive and that would hit CPU usage as the program has to wait for data to load. Similarly if there's insufficient memory available for the program to use then the data may be paged, again hitting performance hard. Adding more memory doesn't make pictures quicker to load from a hard drive, etc.

All I'm saying is that looking at one statistic alone may not be the best indicator of a performance bottleneck, but my earlier post is right - you will never get 100% CPU usage while using Xara alone in a multi-core machine.

[behzad]

Paul thank you for all your help. I've looked into the 8G memory card and it is only $40 so I will give that a try. This one project I am working on for a client has very long content on each page.