Oh I completely agree that basic desktop computing is still reasonably responsive on older CPUs; I'm just pointing out that the mere idea of a six year old CPU being called "pretty fast" by current standards would have been unthinkable for most of my lifetime.

> IIRC, Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7 on slow hardware.

This has not been my experience with Windows 7 ==> 10.

10 (and IIRC 8?) felt incredibly slow on my gaming PC until I switched to an SSD for the OS disk. I think it hits disk way, way more often than 7, which makes it feel slower. Even on an SSD it doesn't really seem any better than 7 did on spinning rust (programs load faster, of course, but you can't really credit the OS for that—the OS interface itself, and OS utilities, don't seem faster). This was true even with Cortana and all that junk totally disabled.

Strange. I'd expect you to be hitting at least 40-50fps on 1080 High settings in R6 Siege with those specs. Minimum system requirements for R6 Siege is an i3. Maybe because its a laptop you are either hitting thermal limits or you have significantly less VRAM than the desktop counterpart.

> Minimum system requirements for R6 Siege is an i3.

I've never played R6 Siege and have no idea how it performs, but I would just like to say that this is effectively meaningless and I hate how games put it in their system requirements. Writing "moderately fast CPU" would carry more useful information. A Westmere Core i3-530 from 2010 is not going to perform anything like a Coffee Lake Core i3-8100B from 2018.

(I'm not that smart, I looked up the model numbers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i3_micropro...)

The actual minimum listed for that particular game seems like it does what you're asking for:

> Intel Core i3 560 @ 3.3 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 945 @ 3.0 GHz