We were surprised at how slow this laptop was!
As a comparison, an 11-year-old Acer AO722 with an AMD C-60 upgraded to an SSD and 8GB of 2Rx8 memory would run circles around this thing (sad). The A6-9220e used in this laptop is designed for low power consumption, but with a faster front bus speed and superior graphics it should perform significantly faster than it's great-grandfather the C-60. So we decided to do some digging/testing to see where the problems were.
First, we noticed that there was a significant problem with the memory Lenovo managed to solder to the board: 4GB of DDR4-1866 1Rx16. This is way below the optimal memory AMD suggests for Windows 10: 8GB DDR4-2133 2Rx8. We suspect that the 1866 MHz memory was further utilized to reduce power consumption, but the 1Rx16 rank is incredibly crippling. Even 1Rx8 rank @ 1866 MHz would have been a major improvement.
Also, when the installed memory was tested, it performs slower than other DDR4-1866 1Rx16 sticks of memory. It's almost as if the memory channels Virtualization was punching way below 1866 MHz. Even with the BIOS upgrade, this problem persisted (We were hoping it was in the firmware). We believe this may be another Lenovo attempt to extend battery life.
Note to Lenovo: Please stop soldering memory to the motherboards, your system qualities are far better than that! All your managing to do in most cases is kill dual channel mode performance, and reduce the extended lifetime of your laptops. While soldered memory is acceptable on devices with Chrome OS, it is a dead end when it comes to Windows devices.
On Windows 10 devices running 4GB of memory, or less, virtual memory (VM or paging file) usage often begins by the time the system reaches 2.5GB of memory storage. You must understand that current memory is also being shared by the graphics that is internal to most CPUs. It's part of the reason why laptop gaming often improves, even on older laptops, if the system is running 16GB of memory or better. Regardless, the VM uses the hard drive / eMMC / SSD to extend the physical memory, which can be incredibly slow. The problem for eMMC's and SSD's is that they're constantly being written to reducing their lifespan. A system that can support 8GB of memory greatly reduces this problem.
This is where we found our problem. The Union Memory SSD (01FR572) that Lenovo has chosen to use in this laptop is complete and utter trash! Once again, we're not sure if this is meant to be a power thing, but it's bandwidth performance was nearly non-existent. As a test, we removed the SSD and installed Windows 10 Pro onto a high grade Samsung SD card (Yes, a standard size SD card), and actually managed better performance than Lenovo's stock setup!
Next, we cloned the factory SSD to a Transcend TS128GMTS430S and replaced it. Even with the 4GB memory wall the performance was substantially better. The boot time was so fast, we had to cut the laptop off and try it again to verify the quickness. Programs opened nearly immediately, as well as tabs using the Edge Browser. You gotta understand, it's still being strangled by the memory bandwidth / rank.
It's sad that this laptop requires a $50+ upgrade just to make it more usable.