For remote and hybrid workers
It is fine at nine. By three it is unusable.
You cannot install diagnostic software on a machine you do not administer, and “it feels slow” has never once won an argument with a service desk. This runs in the browser and ends in a link you can paste into the ticket.
What the report tells you
Three figures, each with its reading.
Sustained throughput
%
What the machine holds through a long stretch of work, which is the part of the day where you actually notice.
Consistency
%
Whether it behaves the same way twice. Low consistency on a corporate laptop usually means the security agent, not the silicon.
The report link
share
A page in plain words that someone at the service desk can open. This is the difference between a ticket that gets triaged and one that gets closed as no fault found.
The diagnosis
The shape of the curve, read for your case.
01A slide through the run
A thermal limit. On a laptop that lives in a bag and works on a sofa, blocked intakes are the most common cause and the easiest to fix.
02Noise rather than a curve
Contention. Something else is using the machine, and on a managed laptop that is usually a scheduled scan or a sync you did not know was running.
03Fine plugged in, poor on battery
A power policy doing what it was configured to do. Worth raising with IT as a policy question rather than a hardware one.
Every class comes with a stated confidence and the measurement’s own noise floor. How the shape is read
Where a browser stops
What it cannot tell you.
- It cannot see your VPN, your network or the specific applications your company runs, all of which can produce the same feeling.
- It cannot tell you which background agent is competing. It can tell you that something is, which is usually enough to get the question asked.
- No temperature and no fan speed, so it describes the effect and not the cause in degrees.
Which run
Standard, 3 minutes.
About 3½ minutes between meetings. If the complaint is specifically about long calls or long builds, the deep run reaches the part of the day where it goes wrong.
Both kinds are free. The choice is on the set-up screen.
Questions
Asked in these words.
- Can I run this on a locked-down work laptop?
- Usually, because there is nothing to install and nothing to approve. It runs in a browser tab. Company policy is still company policy, but a web page does not need administrator rights.
- How do I make IT take this seriously?
- Send the report link rather than a description. “Slow in the afternoons” is a feeling; a curve showing the machine holding barely half of its opening throughput after three minutes is a measurement, and service desks are built to act on measurements.
- Is it my laptop or the video call software?
- Run the test with everything closed. If the machine slides on its own, the machine is the limit and the software is only the first thing to notice. If it is flat, look at the software and the network.