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4 simple software upgrades that made my old laptop feel productive
Having a seven-year-old laptop is frustrating, especially when you have to run the same tools everyone uses today. From my fans spinning because I have a dozen tabs open to delays in apps like Word launching, this shows the laptop is built for a different era.
However, before writing the machine off, I decided to swap out some software for lighter alternatives. I expected some improvement, but I never guessed it would make me this much more productive.
Brave
It finally stopped 12 tabs from bringing everything else to a crawl
My computer is a 2018 Latitude 5490 with a Core i5-8250U, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 256GB SSD. I used Chrome because it was the most convenient for all my accounts. But opening more than a dozen tabs almost brought my computer to a halt. If I'm playing music at the same time, it starts stuttering; characters appear about half a second after I type them; and there's a noticeable delay when switching between application windows or browser tabs.
Chrome uses a lot of system resources because it keeps separate processes for tabs and extensions, and runs background services like syncing. I uninstalled it and switched to Brave. Brave was an ideal choice because it's Chromium-based, allowing me to carry over the extensions I relied on for daily tasks. However, I ended up using far fewer extensions with Brave thanks to its native privacy engine. I no longer needed separate extensions like uBlock Origin, ClearURLs, Consent-O-Matic, and Canvas Defender. My computer feels noticeably more responsive.
OnlyOffice Desktop Editors
Faster document editing without Microsoft 365
It took about 15 seconds from double-clicking the Word app to opening a blank document. It could take up to 30 seconds if the file were large and contained several embedded images. On several occasions, I've lost my train of thought just waiting for Word to open. It was clear that Microsoft 365 wasn't built for my device. My first stop was LibreOffice. I just couldn't stand the interface; it felt a bit old. I needed something that looked closer to what I already used. OnlyOffice Desktop Editors, with its ribbon layout, seemed the most similar to Word.
Not only did I avoid relearning the interface, but documents that took 30 seconds to open in Word now open in under five seconds in OnlyOffice. The formatting also held up well, even with my spreadsheets containing pivot tables and complex formatting. On LibreOffice, I often got "some features are unsupported," but there was none of that with OnlyOffice Desktop Editors. I feel Word's grammar checker is much better, but I'm fine with that tradeoff if I don't have to wait an eternity to start working after launching an app.
Joplin
A lighter notes app that I actually started using
My notes were one of the biggest offenders on my computer. They consisted of several Chrome tabs, a few Notion pages, and the sticky notes I used once in a while. Aside from being a very disorganized setup, they relied on apps that constantly slowed everything else down.
Joplin first caught my attention because it's open source, but that's not what convinced me to keep using it. It stores my notes as plain Markdown, meaning I didn't need any special tools to access them. Using it with its Web Clipper extension has totally changed my note-taking habits. I don't have to leave Chrome tabs open to read later because I can clip the article straight into a notebook. This little feature makes me less reliant on my browser; I can run fewer tabs and conserve system resources.
Joplin's search returned almost instant results, even when I searched through a few hundred notes. This was a bigger productivity boost than I expected. I sync through a free Dropbox folder without any visible drain in Task Manager. It lacks Notion's collaborative web workspace and has far less polish, but on a seven-year-old device, I'd pick responsiveness over polish any day.
Sumatra PDF
Opening a document stopped feeling like launching an office suite
Signing, editing, and converting documents are the strong points of Adobe Acrobat. But you also have to endure being nudged toward a subscription every so often. Opening a 20-page PDF took more than ten seconds on this laptop, and most of that time was spent loading tools that I never needed.
I switched to Sumatra PDF. It opens the same files in under three seconds, avoiding splash screens, cloud sign-in, and several tools that make me go down rabbit holes to find the ones I actually need.
I wish it supported annotations beyond basic highlighting or had a proper way to fill out forms. Xodo PDF Reader's desktop app is a middle ground. It's also fast but includes the markup tools that Sumatra skips.
Other swaps that also reduced background overhead
There are other swaps I made that may not get a full section. But they were all lighter alternatives that cleared a good chunk of my startup list:
While these apps have helped me stay productive on an older, slower system, one of the most beneficial habits has been checking Task Manager after any installation. Looking through the memory usage and background processes instantly tells me whether an app should stay installed or be removed. The key to staying productive on a slow system is knowing that responsiveness is defined by what isn't running.
