Because they use different controllers. Only since Ivy Bridge microarchitecture Intel included USB 3.0 controller into their chipsets. So manufacturers must use a separate USB 3.0 controller from other companies if they want to provide a USB 3.0 port in mainboards using Sandy Bridge and older chipsets. That makes designing more complex beside taking more mainboard area and power.

One important point is that most external controllers often only supports 2 ports, and one may be used internally for some purpose, only one is exposed to users and that's why you often see old laptops with only 1 USB 3.o port and 1-3 more USB 2.0 ports from native controller inside the chipset. Newer laptops may have more or all USB 3.0 ports.
This is also the same reason for some mainboards have different SATA port

HDDs and SSDs are very much slower than the various other busses in the computer. SSDs are much faster because of the much reduced latency and secondly usually have much improved sequential read/write times as well.

A computer will keep programs in to RAM, you can test this yourself, if you have a HDD rather than SSD, boot up your PC and immediately load your web browser and time how long it takes to load, next close the browser and reopen it, you'll see it will load much quicker than before. Why is this? This is because the computer has to load the data from the very slow hard drive to the RAM, once the program is in RAM the computer will decide whether to keep it there or not based on various factors. So next time you open the web browser, the operating system (OS) says ah yes I thought you might want to do that, so I've kept the program in RAM. RAM speeds are in the order of many GB/s (gigabytes per second). This is still the same for SSDs but because of their improved latency, random read times and sequential read times you won't notice the difference as much as a HDD. All SSDs and HDDs based on SATA 3/III (6GB/s) bus are in the order of many MB/s (Megabytes per second) and therefore considerably slower than RAM. Even the fastest SSDs are no match for modern DDR3/DDR4 RAM speeds.

The above is essentially a not too technical description of what happens. It's also the reason why task killers are a very bad idea on modern phone/tablet OS's, so long as you have enough RAM, it's better to keep the programs in RAM than freeing up the RAM, a task killer works against the principles which make the OS faster. There comes a point where having more RAM won't help you simply because in general usage you'll never be able to saturate it. If you can't use your RAM effectively then it's essentially a waste.

Lastly Intel are pulling the wool over the eyes of the consumer, for quite some time now they've had dual core i7 CPUs, where as in the past i7's were always quad core. Therefore there's little difference between the i3.i5.i7 tiers except clock speed and cache. Clock speed can be taken in to consideration as a comparison as it's the same architecture being compared.

TL;DR : Yes change the HDD for SSD you will see a big improvement in performance.

Potentially daft question, but why do all computers come with 2 x USB 2 and 1 x USB 3? USB 3s are compatible with 2, right? I don't understand why they don't do all 3 ports. Again, I'm not techy, so possibly missing something obvious, but I'd love to know.

So you completely missed his point, spent hundreds of words failing to answer his simple question, then got petulant.
A good mornings work, well done!

Just to say that this laptop is still a Very Good and well balanced piece of equipment and comes at a reasonable priceand nt to take anything away from Ops post or Soled's detailed comment.
Voted Hot.

Just looked it up and I'm surprised to see you are also correct. I had assumed an i7 6xxx was the latest group of chips but I see this is dated July 2015, so yes not the latest but still good enough for a home PC.

Yup, your right - I was writing on the assumption 'he' was going to play average games but not the latest/powerful - in which case a gaming laptop 'type' would be best. So yes you are correct

Wrong; ​It does not have the latest generation chip; it has a skylake i7 chip NOT Kaby lake.

Thats INCORRECT, you need something like a Nvidia GTX 950 or higher to play some of the latest games in a acceptable capacity IMHO (or atleast get Nvidia 940MX if your really struggling for a budget).
Please check the graphics card benchmarks on http://www.notebookcheck.net/ for further info.

Is this the best laptop, for home use, for 500 quid, anyone in the know here knows of then??? :smiley:

Does anyone know when GTX1050/1050TI laptops will actually hit the shelves in the UK?

Yeah I was being pendantic sorry.

I had this issue, I have the 1TB version, this was even after doing a fresh install without using the Recovery. Another fresh install sorted this issue. May have been a particular order in which I updated Windows/Installed software that caused the slowdown. Still working well! DVD drive is flimsy, but well spec'd laptop.

Yes that's true, still no reason for using the paging file if you have enough RAM :wink: but we shouldn't get in to that debate I think :smiley: With regard to the paging file it's not something I tweak/touch on any PC, I only deal with consumer PCs. There's no definitive answer with the paging file it's dependent on workload. I wouldn't disable it but I also would, meaning you can experiment but don't spent too much time on it

In the early days of SSD's when they were more expensive (and a little fragile) it was quite common place for people to disable the pagefile airing on the side of caution...The world has realised now though that having a pagefile on an SSD doesn't do any harm .

Thank you, yoyelp and myapps - very concise and helpful.

Fishmaster - I probably am incorrect - thanks for pointing that out - but I assume that's usually on higher spec laptops, because the last 20 odd mid/budget range laptops I've looked at on HUK only seem to have the 1 x USB 3 and 2 x USB 2 configuration. It's one of the the first things I check, but of course I probably missed some.

No I definitely answered his question and he even answered the question for himself but obviously didn't realise it. He was almost asking a redundant question if you look at it. How is it not obvious from this quote " I have an SSD in both my laptop and desktop". Doesn't need a lot of thinking about does it.

​You wouldn't have the paging file enabled with an SSD though. So it only applies to HDDs and further strengthens the point being made.

​closest I could find with dedicated graphics

Your comparing any brand to a more expensive acer... Think i prefer my house not to burn down

After getting my first SSD laptop a year ago I'm never going back. Makes such a difference.

Why people need full HD to watch a screen that is a meter away from your face beats me.

about 18 months ago I splashed out & bought the lenovo y70-70 which cost about £1000.00 with a quad i7 processor & 16gb ram & gtx 960m graphics card it should have been the dogs danglies but it was terrible I contacted lenovo quite a few times but kept getting fobbed off or told to reformat the HD & start again but in the end I got on amazon changed their terrible 1tb hybrid drive for a crucial 750gb ssd drive & now it is performing like it should.. I can even run titanfall 2. so the answer to your question is yes swap it asap.

why is it that almost all good laptop deals are on 15inch or larger laptops? I'm only interested in 13 or smaller but they never seem to be on offer!

crud processor scores. i bought a latop for 600 from Dell that had over 9000 on cpu benchmark 3 years ago

All well and good until windows decides to swap applications out of ram back to disk on the pagefile.....

those marks are all a bit rubbish vs a good PC

this one is about 5000

I have ordered one for my sons birthday thanks

Cheers thanks for that

​"You can get something better for more money" is becoming the stock answer on every laptop thread on here at the minute

^^ This. Most laptop i7s are Ultra low voltage/power and have lower throughput than a desktop i3. A laptop i3 plus SSD will be better for most purposes.

Does anyone know if this laptop has the turbo boost to boost from a 2.5 ghz to 3.1 ghz?? as i have read on some sites it does and some it doesnt
.

​ looks like the deal has gone now but always comes back on, acer f15 i5 950m 1tb plus 128sd

I think its still questionable why the hell they are still putting USB 2.0 ports on Laptops?

So you completely missed his point, spent hundreds of words failing to answer his simple question, then got petulant.
A good mornings work, well done!

I know the difference between SSD and HDs, I have an SSD in both my laptop and desktop. What I wanted to know from people with this laptop is whether it was slow to be ready from the time you sign in as this seemed particularly slow.

cold. not an SSD.

Potentially daft question, but why do all computers come with 2 x USB 2 and 1 x USB 3? USB 3s are compatible with 2, right? I don't understand why they don't do all 3 ports. Again, I'm not techy, so possibly missing something obvious, but I'd love to know.

Crippled i7 with no SSD. Much better deals available with i5 it even i3 with SSD will feel faster in daily use.

Should be possible. As The Lone Ranger said, you'll need a caddy and often you'll have to swap the bezel from the optical to the caddy as the seldom fit.
Remember though that there are two heights of DVDs: 12.7mm and 9.5mm so you have to get the right one.
NBC list:
Optical drive HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GUE0N
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-310-15ISK-Notebook-Review.173924.0.html
and googling GUE0N returns 9mm drives.

​Not checked if you can get a caddy, that might be an option.

Certainly looks a better laptop but its around 20% more expensive

My son has this. Quite slow startup, I.e. takes a while after login until it is ready. Anyone else experienced this? Will look into replacing HD with an SSD during his summer break.

A "U" processor so dual core.

Meh, scores hardly any higher than i5 6200u

Good if you need the storage

But for 499?

Dont think so

​http://www.tesco.com/direct/acer-156-f15-intel-core-i5-6200u-8gb-ram-128gb-ssd-1tb-hdd-nvidia-geforce-gtx-950m-2gb-with-dvdrw-silver-gaming-laptop/612-0833.prd

Does anyone know if this would be suitable for using Autodesk Inventor smoothly? Thanks in advance

from my own personal experience, I've had it before where I've plugged in an old USB 2 device into a USB 3 port and its just not behaved as it should. even though there's backward compatibility I would say that sometimes it isn't the case.

you can get a 950m and an ssd for slightly more than this. an i7 doesnt benchmark much much than an i5 on laptops...

Not a bad spec.

Item Weight 2.1 Kg
Product Dimensions 26 x 37.9 x 2.3 cm
Batteries: 1 Lithium Polymer batteries required. (included)
Item model number 80SM00D1UK
Series Ideapad 310-15ISK
Color Silver
Form Factor Notebook
Screen Size 15.6 inches
Screen Resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels
Maximum Display Resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels
Processor Brand Intel
Processor Type Core i7
Processor Speed 2.5 GHz
Processor Count 2
RAM Size 8 GB
Computer Memory Type DDR4 SDRAM
Hard Drive Size 2000 GB
Hard Disk Technology HDD
Graphics Coprocessor Nvidia
Graphics Card Description NVIDIA GeForce 920MX
Graphics RAM Type GDDR3
Graphics Card Ram Size 2048
Connectivity Type 802_11_AC
Wireless Type 802.11 A/C
Number of USB 2.0 Ports 2
Number of USB 3.0 Ports 1
Number of HDMI Ports 1
Optical Drive Type DVD reader/writer
Hardware Platform Windows
Operating System Windows 10
Average Battery Life (in hours) 5 hours
Lithium Battery Energy Content 30 watt_hours
Lithium Battery Packaging batteries_contained_in_equipment