Hi,

there are a few things to consider and some of them are independent from others.

1. CPU: Your System is on the lower end of the requirements needed to run Trados 2019. One point that the system requirements (almost never) mention is that you have to difference between a mobile cpu (usually lower ghz) and a desktop pc. Your CPU is a 2 core cpu running at typical notebook speeds. This is great to save battery power, but it would be a real pain if you go for hi demanding cpu tasks. A simple example - not talking about rendering or videoediting - is if you try to look a film on netfl* and do something different the same time. This might simply overwhelm the cpu since usually in notebooks there is no dedicated extra gpu (graphiccard) and the cpu needs to do some extra work too.
Here are the system-requirements/recommendations for Studio2019: https://gateway.rws.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0026052

2. Memory: 8gb is ok if you only run windows since this almost needs 5-6+gb of your memory just to keep windows running. So you only got 2-3gb of memory that all your running apps have access to. A bit might be used from your antivirus software, a bit from outlook ...., so there is a bottleneck due to the fact that windows is swapping data from memory to harddisk and that is a time consuming thing.

3. HDD: Today there are 2 typical types of HDD on the market. First (and older/usually slower) are the mecanical HDD. For Notebooks the manufacturers tended to use the 5400rpm (rotations per minute) since they didn't need that much power and didn't get that hot too. The second class are the chip-based harddrives (SSD Solid Slate Drive). These are way faster and also consume a lot less power. The downside of these are still the capacities in relation to the price. Plz also check how much free capacity there is on your harddrive.

4. The ISP (Internet Service Provider): depending on the location where you live and the connection you have it might take almost endless to send/receive data to/from the internet. Imagine if you have a dial-up connection with 56k or a DSL or a Cable Connection. You clearly see a difference when doing some simple web-browsing or using MT for pretranslation.

5. The way you work: Usually i tend to have Outlook, Word, Excel and Trados opend the same time (aside of Antivirus etc). That works ok for my pc with 16gb ram. But when i start Dragon things start to get slower. Dragon is a voice recognition software which basically only uses 1 Core (and the ghz matter for its reaction speed), but consumes a lot of my ram. For sure i could run Photoshop too, but it would be a pain and its not necessary in most cases. The point is that if you are limited with your resources you need to consider what programs you really need to be running. Cleaning up your background-tasks might help a bit, but it can't solve the overall ram bottleneck.

6. Tweaking Trados: Checking which plugins i need and which i barely use. Maybe even uninstalling some plugins or setting them to OFF when not needed. I don't know why, but my pc doesn't like single file translations. They tend to disappear from the overview so i make projects even if there is only 1 file to translate. Also deactivating the uplift-function while translating helped me to work with less hang-ups (specially when working with larger files).

Ok. My recommendations if i don't wanna spend a lot of money at the moment for a new pc would be to check if its possible to upgrade my ram to 16gb. Replacing the HDD to an SSD might be worth considering but to be honest on the long run a new pc is the only solution. What i don't recommend is to use some crazy software tuning programs which could mess up your entire system. They usually don't give you the boost you expect and you have a hell lot of more problems later!

Hopefully this helps you a bit.

Kind regards

Oswald Schneider

Thanks a lot Oswald for going into such details. I did not know WIndows 10 requires so much RAM. I will look at upgrading it to 16 Gb before dumping my PC (I only bought it in 2017 and try to use my electronic equipement as long as possible to limit waste). I usually close all the other apps (such as Dropbox in my case) while translating. Have a nice day and thank you again.

Thanks a lot Oswald for going into such details. I did not know WIndows 10 requires so much RAM. I will look at upgrading it to 16 Gb before dumping my PC (I only bought it in 2017 and try to use my electronic equipement as long as possible to limit waste). I usually close all the other apps (such as Dropbox in my case) while translating. Have a nice day and thank you again.