Hi, best wishes for the new year.

Its bit embarrassing to admit ... but honestly I know nothing about tweaking hardware.
I'm no gamer, more a creative ... got an old Dell laptop and wonder if there's any safe method to tweak and get better performance out of the CPU ... just maybe it's possible to make it a whole lot better and maybe I just don't know about it.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz, 2001 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

TIA

you may be able to improve performance by a few percent (nothing more). Actually it depends on the current situation. Probably you can add more RAM, use SSD instead of HDD, and try other tweaks, but don't expect miracle.

Ok yeah have replaced with SSD but told (or read online, not sure) that my old Dell can't register more than the RAM it has even if I try adding more.
But thanks for feedback.

Depending on the board, you could attempt to overclock it to get more performance from it. That's about it from the actual HARDWARE side. On the software side, you could attempt to run something like Gentoo and set your compile options to take advantage of any and every option that the CPU has to maximize your software's optimizations for your hardware. It's not like back in the days of {3,4,5,6}86 optimizations that it can provide a huge boost in performance in certain scenarious, but it CAN provide a boost in certain scenarios if you're willing to spend the time waiting for every single application to recompile from source.

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Thank you ... I'll research and look into Gentoo etc ....

Timothy Miller's advice is sound, but (from personal experience), I'd take care with overclocking. While it *CAN* make things faster, the CPU's are typically set to a speed at the factory where they're known to work reliably. Your mileage may vary when going faster, and it may cause other....'interesting' things to happen, not the least of which is failure of the CPU/MOBO.

I'd just advise caution.

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Yes. You can literally double your CPU performance by changing your CPU scaling governor from "ondemand" (which most distros use by default) to "performance." I'm not joking.

The way to do so is distribution-specific. On Fedora it's

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Note that this is in a laptop which will very likely be thermally constrained as-is and may also be power constrained - while a lot of recent Intel and AMD desktop CPUs can see decent (not anywhere near double though - lets spare the hyperbole - usually the measured performance increases are on the order of 10-20%) performance increases by unshackling their power management, that also usually requires significant increases in cooling and will increase power draw significantly (which can actually be double (or more) for some chips).

Generally the answer here is: no, there isn't a lot you can do to magically 'make it a whole lot better' - it is what it is (especially as a laptop). Removing OS bloat can help, but I'm very skeptical of the Gentoo approach on modern systems as being worth the time investment (and there are light weight distros out there that are less of a chore to install and configure).

If this is an easy to work on laptop, the best advice I could give you would be to open it up and clean out the dust/hair/junk and consider repasting the CPU (just based on the SKU this is around a 10 year old machine), which should improve thermal performance and potentially allow for the most optimal operation (in other words, you aren't 'gaining performance' you're 'restoring performance' to original state, but even that may not see 'actual gains' if things are already pretty tidy and working as designed).

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Great post @obobskivich.

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Thanks everyone ... will take it all into account as I research carefully into it.