Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge, Part 2

Just to be clear,
So, your system is slow right after your computer starts, but if you turn on your system, log-in, and dont' do anything, let the system ON for 5min, and come back, everything is fine. It's just slow as soon as you log-in an use your system immediately.

Is 30sec timed? Or just an exaggeration that is it takes much more time to start then if you wait.

If my understanding on top correct, then I suggest to get CCleaner (free), clean your system, and under "Tools" > "Startup", You should have a maximum of 4 items.
- Sidebar
- Apoint (the touch pad driver)
- Dell System Manager
- MSE (Microsoft Security Essential) -- Anti-Virus/malware/spyware - Don't have it? Remove the anti-virus you have, and get it. It's free, and it's the best.

Anything else should be gone from the list.
Restart your computer, and see if it's better.

 

I wonder if you have an over-zealous anti-virus software that is scrutinising each byte every time you load a program or do anything involving reading / writing the HDD.

Also check what the HDD caching options are set to. Check the policies in the HDD properties in Device Manager. The first option should definitely be selected while you can try the effect on performance of the second option.

john

 

its between 20-30 secs.
startup(except windows): DCP, Steam, Touchpad, Microsoft Security Essentials, Intel Graphics
edit: removed some items: adobe acrobat, cyberlink dvd , photoshop cs4 manager, microsoft office

 

Ill try a defrag
I should switch to W7 soon. as its more optimised, even though i hate some things like left click on taskbar item and taskbar thumbails.
Vista takes 30GB installed then the next time i start its 40GB because of update backup etc. thats not serious.

And 30 secs of startup for firefox was a one time only and it wont repeat itself im sure. Azureus was running and checking some files.

But the SSD will stop this lags from happening, or else i read somewhere there were problems with small files, exactly what where talking about.

 

Re Win 7: I have the visual effects set to Best performance + smooth screen fonts and the appearance and behaviour is very similar to XP (eg each open program has its own entry on the task bar).

Re SSD: The performance of many of them drops off when writing small files but the overall effect is a big boost in performance. The performance gain comes partly from faster read speeds and partly from the near instantaneous access times. Benchmark programs such as PCMark Vantage (which is based on test pieces of real applications) will show that an E6400 with SSD is faster than an E6410 with HDD. I haven't read anything about the Muskin SSDs. You should make sure that it supports TRIM and also set the SATA mode in the BIOS to AHCI before you install Windows 7. Without TRIM the performance will slowly degrade.

John

 

okay ill have to remember that . trims there.
thanks

what kingston do you have
how is the performance?

 

The touchpad is very sensitive on this laptop how do I turn it off? Whenever I am typing I always hit a button on the touchpad......I use a usb mouse

 

Control Panel > Mouse
On there, click on the orange touch pad logo.
From there you can configure your touch pad. Touch pad is a very personal thing, there is no such thing as a perfect touch pad, the same way how a mouse can be comfortable or not (that is why you have thousands of shapes and designed out there).
Also, each touch pad driver that Dell releases they tweak the touch pad... some prefer the newer version, other don't. So you have to try different versions.

 

How can I disable touchpad on this computer? I cant find any settings in control panel.

 

Make sure you have the Dell touchpad driver installed and go to Control Panel > Mouse. That'll bring up the Dell touchpad menu and the option to toggle the touchpad on and off should be under "Device Select".