Insanely slow new T400

Ok, so I bought a new T400 month ago, and I love it. Durable, resistent, looks bussiness-esque (if this word exist...). But I have a problem. I only installed Photoshop CS3, command & conquer Generals, skype, and 4 gb of previous documents, and the laptop feels slow as hell.

This are the components of my laptop>
4 gb RAM
200 gb HDD @7200rpm full encryption
T9400, 2.3 ghz.

It takes 3 minutes to start, if i click music folder, web browser and msn at the same time, takes like 30 seconds to boot this programs. Also, and what conceirn me most, is the HDD. I have the partitions like these>

10 gb of HDD to Lenovo (Q: )
2 GB to ServiceV003 (S: )
188 GB to C:
buuuuut, C is 50% full!!!! Vista size is 17 gb!

My programs installed, and documents imported from my old laptop are not heavier than 15 gb! How on earth can i have 88 gb of HDD free???

I try using Rescue and recovery, PCdoctor 5(dunno how this work) and nothimg.

Please, help my T400 to be healthy again. I need it too much!

Thanx1

 

your problems may be-

1) vista. slow and bulky.

2) factory install. also slow and bulky.

i think the thinkpads are exceptional machines hardware wise, but their software leaves a LOT to be desired. a clean install could help with issue 2, but it's a lot of work. there are those who will surely disagree with me, however.

to start with, i would look at msconfig and uncheck unnecessary programs. how many processes do you have running? to run msconfig, go to start>>>run and type msconfig. now look under startup. do you need all those programs slowing down your computer? no.

search around and find which programs you don't need. these forums and google are good resources. for instance, qttask (for quick time) is unnecessary and can be disabled in msconfig without consequence...

the nice thing about using msconfig is if you find that you want to change something back, just recheck it.

also, search these forums for ways to speed up vista. you will find some really great threads.

 

Hmm, I never used HDD with full encryption before, maybe that could be the cause. Also, Vista has system restore which takes a lot of space. You can try this software LINK to see what is consuming your hdd space

 

I’m not sure what issue the OP is having, sounds like their might be a problem with the HD, but it’s not related to the full disk encryption—as I use full disk encryption and my notebook still “screams.”

 

Thanx all. So my solution is a clean install? Or should I try a full recovery, deleting eeeevrything i have?

BinkNR, you seem to have almost the same T400 than me, urs is slow?

 

a clean install is *A* solution. i think you can probably tweak your system to get it snappy without going through an entire clean install... but it's your choice, of course.

a full recovery might not do much, considering you haven't changed things much from the factory state anyway. i imagine a full recovery would put you right back where you are now once you had the same programs and data installed.

i really think you can speed things up significantly by turning off (msconfig) and uninstalling unnecessary software, among other things.

i suggest looking over this guide by les:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

a lot of that thread is devoted to boot time, but many of the tweaks are applicable to performance in general.

 

My T400 is very fast.

 

might wanna check you HD health too.

 

I STRONGLY suggest doing a clean install. IMO XP is by far more superior compared to Vista in terms of speed and usability.

There's a guide to do a clean install on T400 here at NBR. I'm so sure you'll be satisfied with your newborn machine. XP all the way. Heck I even use a visual theme exactly the same as Vista's so my T61 XP install looks like Vista (practically I get the 'vista' view in my fav. OS)

 

fuanacho was your system slow from the start or after you installed your programs?

If it was slow from the start it may be an hardware problem because no matter what's you OS it wouldn't be that slow with a T9400 - 4GB mem - 7200 rpm HD in it as also BinkNR stated.

If it became slower after a few installed programs then you may want to do a System Restore to Factory Defaults and then reinstall your programs 1 by 1 testing after each one for system speed.
Maybe your old Laptop had XP as OS and when you imported your programs into your Vista system they don't work as well with it.

just my 2c hope it can help

 

I don't think a clean install is needed; I've compare a clean install vs. a factory default recovery, and the performance is the same.

One problem may be no pagefile. I"ve found in Vista SP1, you really have to have it, even with 4GB RAM. I had a lot of performance issues until I enabled a 2GB swapfile (probably could have gone lower; it just needs some space.)

Also, I killed Indexing/Search and Superfetch services. (I use a different search tool). The performance is a lot better than it was (which was already pretty good.)

Vista is better than XP in many way; people who hate Vista just haven't done the well published tweaks to make it run "right".

 

"Vista is better than XP in many way; people who hate Vista just haven't done the well published tweaks to make it run "right"."

It should run like that out of the box, shouldn't really require tweaks to run has the older OS.

 

Spoken like a true noob. There are many feature in Vista, like UAC, which were put there to protect users from themselves and rogue apps. It "slows" things down on purpose. But it easily removed.

Windows search is worse on XP than Vista (although I use a different tool.)

Vista uses memory much better than XP, and it performs better as a result.

To each their own...there were plenty of people who stuck with Windows 2000 once XP showed up, because XP was "slower/problematic". Of course, a few years later, everyone was on XP. It's the same with Vista.

My T400 smokes on Vista x64.

 

Let me put this in caps "IT'S YOUR BIOS"!

Apparantely, lenovo has problems with their bois clocking the CPUS at a lower frequency!....Go to you thinkpad UPDATE and download the new BIOS...It clearly says under the new BIOS, that it will fix the wrong frequency on some CPUS that the bios has the problem on clocking with some cpus


IF you have already done this, and still slow on opening 2 programs at once, make sure your power profile is set to full performance and check the settings on each variable. If none of these options work....call tech support me and have the laptop replaced, you might have a faulty product. PM me if you have any questions

 

First, a "200 gb" hdd isn't really 200 gb. It's only about 186 binary gigabytes (which is what everyone uses except the HDD manufacturers). More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion

Secondly, Vista's system restore sees free disk space and decides to use it. It says, better to use the space for automated file backups than to let it sit empty. (I agree.) As you fill up the disk, it'll automatically shrink the amount of space used for these backups. If it doesn't shrink it fast enough for some reason and you need the space, you can run Vista's built-in Disk Cleanup utility. But if you really want to control the amount of space used for system restore, you can do so with the vssadmin command. (Google can provide more info on that I'm sure.)

Regarding the slow boot times and program load times... download and run HD Tune. I'm wondering if your disk performance is ok...

 

Thanx all. First that I did was a reocvery and later eliminate some start up programs that i didn't need. After the recovery I have 105 gb free of the HDD(the 170 gb partition C: ). Now is a little faster, but the start up still takes like 2 to 3 minutes (now is a little less of course).

I will try all the programs you say, and the advices. Thanx!

About the healthy of my disk and performance, acordding to PC doctor is OK.