Booting and hard drive issues with thinkpad T420s

First experience with a brand new thinkpad T420s: booting win7 takes 90 seconds until I can open a browser. Screens stays black for 10 seconds after windows logo and before the password is asked. Where is the « rapidboot » technology lenovo advertises for this model?
Second disappointment: my 500GB / 7200 rpm hard drive I would like to recycle from my dead T61 does not fit in the compartiment ! Did not know T420s would only accept 7mm hard drives. Because I meant to recycle the 500GB I bought the T420s with the cheapest HD, a 5400rpm with 250GB, which might slow my boot because of the 5400rpm. And it is really, really painful to end up with half of space while buying a brand new laptop.
I am thinking about buying a new hard drive, can somebody give me advice ? Would a 7200rpm / 320 GB (theres is a 7mm by hitachi) have a chance to increase my boot speed? I heard hitachi had released a 500GB / 5400rpm of 7mm but I find nowhere to buy it.
Has someone experience with working with an extrernal usb 3.0 hd as if it were an internal disk (doing graphic intensive work, GIS, etc), including using a 2,5 hd usb 3.0 external case (to put my 500BG drive there), is this safe?
Trying to fix these issues with about 100 bucks, just spended 1600 for the laptop... and 15 for a too big 14` sleeve case that makes my laptop look like a b-boy in his hanging pants.
Thank you very much for your help

 

My old T60 is ready to start browsing faster than that.

I suspect you have too much crap running at start up.

Look up Toolbar Cop and AutoRuns

Autoruns for Windows

Thinkpads have a lot of crap from the factory you generally don't need.

 

Changing certain services' start type can cause RapidBoot to freak out and cause long delays when it synchroneously waits for a service that it expects to have started earlier.

Autoruns is good, but you can end up breaking things.

 

1. Rapidboot is available at the Lenovo downloads. Feed in your computer details and then look in the utility section. The latest version is dated 8th August 2011 so it may not be preinstalled (it's best to assume that your computer config is a month or two out of date). I think it takes several startups for both Windows 7 and Rapidboot to optimize themselves.

2. My T420s came with a Momentus Thin 320GB 7200rpm so there is a choice of drives but 320GB seems to be the limit at the moment. With 1TB on 2 platters now available it's only a matter of time before a 500GB 1 platter 7mm drive appears. Some people have squeezed 9.5mm drives into the T420s (or X220) by leaving off the rails and grinding off some metal. However, it's something I'm not planning to try.

3. Your alternatives for getting more capacity are (a) putting a mSATA SSD into the WWAN slot (this will also transform the boot performance if you use it as a boot drive) and / or putting your bigger HDD into an UltraBay caddy (which will mean going without the optical drive). USB 3.0 is not an option for a boot drive because USB 3.0 is not yet supported in the BIOS. I would have preferred Lenovo to have provided an eSATA / USB combo port (as on the T420). However, you can use USB 3.0 as a data drive. I tested my USB 3.0 port with an SSD which is a lot faster than the HDDs and it ran fine.

John