The OP doesn't even mention what CPU he has and yet states, that is his issue. The Elite line was introduced in 2008, so who knows what he has. Huge difference between a 5th gen I5 vs a 12th gen.If your CPU is maxed, then more RAM might not help. If you're looking at a system monitor and it shows CPU at 100% and free memory, then it's really a CPU issue, and those are rarely upgradeable on laptops.
I'd also make sure you've isolated the VI activity to be sure it's not something else that chewing up your CPU, or at least contributing.
I haven't looked at Wintel hardware in a while, but with CPU, it's all about cores/threads, cache and speed. With VIs, it can be a storage transfer bottleneck, so you should definitely go with M.2 storage, PCIe gen 4 or gen 5 even better.
The other thing to be concerned about is the creep in system demand OS and app updates will continually bring, because the latest software is developed on the latest hardware. If you want to get some life out of your hardware $, just stop updating anything, if you can. Turn off the internet/WiFi activity, etc. Maybe you know all that.
Just grabbing a higher end Lenovo out of the bunch, this looks pretty powerful:
(Me, I started using a Mac before retiring from HP's commercial notebook division - s/w guy, but within a few years I've moved all to a single Mac, so I could be missing the boat here, but the ideas are the same as when I started tinkering with this audio stuff a while back.)
Good luck.
Sorry, kinda off topic: Don't you have that 'east west' or some library VST that came with it's own hard drives?+1 to the questions and need for clarity here.
How certain are you that CPU is what's suffering? If your sample library drive is a spinning disk it's just as likely, or more likely, to be that which is struggling.
It's easy enough to monitor real time activity stats on any modern OS and see what exactly is struggling.
If you go to Windows Settings and select Systems, at the bottom of the list is an about option. Click it and it will list your device specification including the CPU model number. A modern I5 will kick the crap out of an old I7 for performance. We've been saying that generation of CPU is the important detail.Hi just seen all this . I had an i5 laptop 2.6ghz with 16gb ram 256 SSD. Just bought a second hand Lenovo box i7 3.4ghz 32gb ram 500 SSD. I'm looking to get spitfire chamber essentials . The laptop just about handled the split down originals libraries but got crunched on fast repeats spiccato . Will this be enough . Chamber looks like a 28gb file so likely more CPU intensive overall I guess . Many thanks
You need a recently made computer in my opinion.I figured the clock speed being faster might make a difference