looking for a new desktop

The first question you need to answer is why are you considering replacement?

Then will an upgrade fix your reason economically?

is your PC rather slow? i bought a new Lenovo Think Centre 16 Gb & added Crucial RAM 16GB DDR4 3200MHz CL22 (or 2933MHz or 2666MHz) Desktop Memory CT16G4DFRA32A for about 55€ from Amazon (40,32€ from France)

Masq, it is not that it is SLOW, but i see sometimes the running circle rotating, eg when changing pages on EE

i must add i don't use very demanding software

that is a signal for me to start looking around - + and - of year approaching

SO again : what are you guys thinking?

-are the newer ones much faster ?  ( i'm running on an Nvme disk now )  what would you do?  i know that a newer system will cost 300-500 €

-would upgrading to 32 GB ram make much difference?

Ok Lee - i'll do some checking 

gr8gonzo how can i test the 3 points you posted?

thank you all for the input so far - and keep it coming plse!

@ Lee  in resource monitor, to my surprise, i saw 5 errors in ram listed ! running memtest a couple of times did not show any errors though

here the results from RM with EE just open 

>>   were you experiencing an issue at the time you took the screen shot?   <<  no

i'll look at it for a couple of days and see what happens

gr8gonzo that are the steps i take, where Xis question 1 and Y = Q 2 and so on

step 3 takes min 5 seconds, but sometimes up to 15  ( will measure it later)

ok update ;

i updated the bios - nothing else, and since then it goes about 2x as fast

can it be due to the update?  or did EE change things a couple of days ago?

likely not.

unless you use DOS, your system does not read on the drive with int13h ;) or do much with bios features. actually you probably boot from EFI so such features are not even available.

if you updated the chipset and possibly a bunch of microcode including for example the ethernet adapter as part of the pack, it might make sense but that is quite circomvoluted.

must  likely the reboot did the job, or you got lucky.

that was my thinking too; but with modern pc's i don't use the word " it cannot be" anymore

i reboot 3x per day

i NEVER reboot. but then i do not use windows ;)

if the slowowns are specific to ee, you can debug with the network pane of the developper tools. i know for a fact ee has a hard time with poor networks and sometimes go into loops in such cases. never bothered to debug, though as reloading the page usually just works.

do you experience other slowdowns ? ... note that disk related slowdowns are hard to debug in windows since most tools do not provide the transaction rate which is usually maxed out way before what throughput based tools show.

additionally, the agressive swapping policy does not help. in the past, this could be partly circumvented by giving priority to background apps in system settings. not sure the setting even exists nowadays.

it also makes sense to check for maxed out cpu cores rather than overall. some browsers only use a single cpu per window or for all windows and a single page can easily kill a core...

>>  i NEVER reboot.   <<  Why?  any reason?  it takes 20 sec....

>>  do you experience other slowdowns ? ...   <<   not that i'm aware of

>>   you can debug with the network pane of the developper tools.   <<  interesting - can you post a link to get me started?

a link won't help much. developper tools are builtin most browsers. the network tab is one easy way to see failed and abnormally long queries. some browsers also have timing information printed as a gant schema for related downloads. the console tab might also produce valuable information including errors that are not necessarily displayed on the page. i recollect ee waiting forever for some already failed query while displaying lists of questions for example.

the network issue itself would rather be debugged using wireshark, pings with large payloads, etc. 

it is fairly possible the issue is just some poor link somewhere along the chain. a traceroute can help. if you use a vpn, such issues are totally expected.