I set up Linux Mint Cinnamon on a laptop my friend gave me with a broken Windows Install. She gave it back to me and told me it was very slow, YouTube videos were stuttering etc.
Now I have it here for testing and for the first 30 minutes everything went fine. Stress test with s-tui and four 4K YouTube Videos in parallel. Unplugged the power, CPU went down a bit but still everything good.
Then from one moment to the other - everything slowed down, while only watching one YouTube video. I checked s-tui and CPU frequencies are down to ~200MHz while load is pretty heavy. Every click has a lag of multiple seconds, I couldn't even open Shutter to make a screenshot as it is not responding.
Anybody any idea what's going on here? Is Cinnamon too much for this device? I am not much of a hardware guy and also don't understand a lot about operating systems, so please be a bit patient with me ;)
Laptop is Lenovo Yoga X1 3rd Gen i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz x 4 16 GB RAM
Yes create a Windows stick and boot from that. But that's a lot of work, just create a Windows setup stick and install it. Installing Windows and running some tests should take less than an hour and can save you a lot of headache. You can download the ISO directly from Microsoft and you don't need a license for some simple testing like this.
Temperatures read out in software can be very unreliable. The software might say it's perfectly fine and the thing still throttles because some part of the chip gets too hot.
Cleaning it out and re-doing the paste is my go to for any refurbishment on old laptops. Unless it's something weird like liquid metal or something, it's usually very easy and quick to do. And even if it isn't strictly needed, it usually helps.