Our new laptop is really slow

[Darkzero45]

We got a new laptop, the Acer Aspire V5-122P-0408. It has: AMD Dual-Core A4-1250 1GHz, 4GB DDR3, and 500GB HDD. Based on those specs, this computer should have zero issues doing things like facebook or watching videos. It should even be able to play vanilla Minecraft on low video settings. This computer is very slow. I'm talking brand new, just out of the box slow. I even uninstalled the extra junk that came with it. You all know the useless filler crap I'm talking about. Like on a phone you get stupid extra apps that you don't really need. That kind of stuff. So anyway, I'm not sure how to make it run faster. It's irritating.

[rubberman]

Other than the snail-slow 1GHz CPU, the specs are OK. Video display is more a function of the GPU (graphics processor) which on this device is probably running at 1GHz as well, which doesn't do too well for rendering videos running at full resolution and frame-rates. I assume it is running Windows 8.x and you are probably using the bundled media player. Try installing VLC and see if that works better for media playback purposes (video). It won't help for the other stuff, but it is the best video player currently available, and cheap at 2x the price since it is FOSS (free and open source).

FWIW, dual cores doesn't mean that it is any faster at a single task than 1 core unless it is multi-threaded. It just means that it can do twice the number of tasks at the same time.

[gerbil]

I consider that processor, the AMD Dual-Core A4-1250 1GHz almost cripplingly slow, more for a tablet than a laptop.
Forget games. It's for simple office stuff, processes which are not at all demanding. I would not expect it to perform well with video editing/playback. Okay, I'll say it: Acer should be ashamed to have put it into any laptop.