Also that reminds me, the laptop came with Windows Vista (32-bit despite the amd64 CPU) but it was really slow… Then I did a clean install of Windows 7 x64 and later Vista x64 and both ran quite fast.
And I thought of another story too. Once I played Tinker on the laptop while using the dedicated GPU (the laptop has a physical switch) and it overheated… I think it also overheated when I used NoVNC on 8.1 too. Anyway switching to integrated fixed the issue for Tinker I think?