Improve my laptop

[Mal22]

Hello, 

I’m Looking for some advice on how to speed up my laptop for processing. At the moment it takes most of the day to do a +10 hour stack.
 

I have an Acer Aspire 5 - obviously not the best comp for the job but for a while it is what I will have to work with. Eventually I’ll build a comp specifically for processing, but not for a few years. The Acer actually runs PixInsight processes fine and without too much delay, but it’s stacking in DSS that takes a lifetime. 

My question is: if I add more RAM to the laptop, will the stacking be faster? Is that how it works (I don’t really understand what’s under the bonnet of computers). Is there something else I should do to improve it?

Adding more RAM seems to be a relatively cheap and technically simple to due process, from what I can see, so will it make a big difference? 
 

Grateful for any advice! 
 

Tim

[Elp]

One of the biggest upgradable differences will be an NVME SSD drive like a Samsung Evo, if it's a newish laptop likely it has an SSD drive already but not all SSDs are the same hence the mention of the Evo. RAM will help a little bit most of the heavy lifting is done by the processor. The longest my stacking has ever taken is around 45 minutes for around 3-4 hours of data at 40Mb per image, I usually stack after every session to check the run, then just stack the stacks when I want to finish the image. You could also try Siril, I've found it's faster than DSS. Also disable as much as practically possible on startup, you'll notice the laptop starts quicker and RAM isn't unnecessarily allocated to programs running in the background (as minimal it is though).

 

[Budgie1]

+1 for fitting a SSD drive to replace the older disc hard drive.

When I fitted one to my desktop, it went from 3-4 minutes to boot up down to just 25 seconds from pushing the ON button to Windows being up & running.

Whether it'll make DSS faster, I don't know, but fetching & storing files is much much faster.

[Mal22]

@Elp @Budgie1 Thanks both for the helpful responses! 

I’ll do exactly what you suggest and try fitting a NVME SSD

[Elp]

Check the device manager in settings first if you're running Windows, it'll tell you what hard drive is currently fitted.