CPU reaching 100% despite upgrading my RAM on my old laptop. Fix it or replace it?

Hi gamers,

I recently upgraded my RAM from 8GB to 16GB on my 2013 Sony Vaio laptop and it was a game changer. However, despite running several Chrome tabs and using tools like Photoshop, Figma and Visual Studio code, the CPU reaches 100% and laptop gets hot and the fan is loud.

I have 2 laptops, a macbook 2015 13in (8GB soldered RAM is shit, so can only use it for general use) and my 2013 Sony Vaio.

I am looking for a cheap laptop for the above use case, ideally less than £400. Would a ThinkPad T14 Gen 2 13.3inch i5-1135G7 be sufficient?

Thanks!

If you're coding and doing graphics work, is a 13.3" laptop good enough? If you use external screens, would you consider a desktop?

This only has 8GB RAM but fits your budget, and you could upgrade the RAM (up to 32GB). 15.6" screen, Ryzen 5 4600H, GTX 1650, 512GB SSD, additional m.2 slot.

Here is a comparison between the laptop I suggested and the Thinkpad's CPU, basically the same, however the Thinkpad has a far weaker GPU.

You could actually do a lot of gaming too on the laptop I suggested!

Moved this to the appropriate board

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Edited:

Responding to the title here... buying more ram has nothing to do with how much your cpu is being used

whatever the program or app asks for is what the cpu will use, ram will just let you do more. However you'll still be limited by what your cpu can do physically and from the sounds of it, its pretty old if 2013/2015. So it's very limited and probably has 2 cores or just 4 cores w/o any hyperthreading.

What ram can do is let you have more apps/programs open at once, or even tabs on a browser.

It could let you play games you couldn't due to not enough ram or crashing cause low ram.

It sounds like your cpu needs more cores and can't handle the daily operations/tasks you're trying to do on it

which is very common in older laptops

That i5-1135G7

is a 4 core / 8 thread cpu and would probably be better than the 2013 one you're using, or even that 2015 for sure.

But it's a laptop, they run hot and you should expect that. A desktop you can control the heat much better, but at the cost of portability. But with a desktop, you could get more cores than that which would handle everything better if you do a lot.

I used to use a T14. Very practical, no non-sense laptop. Probably not the best pick for modern photoshop or intensive tasks due to having an older i5 but likely still better than what you have.

Some other pros about it are that you can expand the memory to be pretty high. It has a couple standard USB ports right on the laptop. USB-C connection works with several dock models. It also has an HDMI port. Screen is standard 16:9 1080p screen which I consider a plus. When I used it, it did not get hot albeit I wasn't really stressing it much, it's not like I was using it for gaming or anything intensive.

Good point. Most likely I will hook it up to an external monitor. I did think about gaming laptops, but my issue is the support it has. I discovered that Thinkpad parts and support is amazing. Yeah, I have heard that AMD Ryzen has been better than Intel for CPU

Interesting perspective. Yeah I have heard that a desktop is way better and bang for your buck when it comes to maintenance. Both of my laptops are intel dual-core i5. Why can't laptops just give us the option to replace the processor

Dude, my work laptop is E14 Gen 2 and I use it for Figma, photoshop and coding. The AMD Ryzen 5 4000 has been running well on my work laptop, but it sucks with 8GB RAM :( That's why I have been considering a thinkpad for its productivity and support (The Thinkpad Cult lol).

I like the build quality of these Thinkpads. I've had 2 in my lifetime at work

You could take a look at the second hand market for a CPU upgrade (after checking the supported list, assuming your old laptop did not come with the highest spec for that model). Plenty of repair shops out there selling good used laptop CPUs for a few bucks.

Upgraded a 10 year old Celeron laptop to an i3 for 10€ a while ago and it made a significant difference.