NP8454 sluggish performance

I've had the NP8454 for about 15 months and have never been all that pleased with the performance. It always seems extremely sluggish.

I sent it back several times while under warranty for the finger print reader not working correctly. Sager support were awesome about working on it and did replace components but never could reliably duplicate or prove a fault. The longer I have the machine the more I think that the reader issues may have been performance related all along. The machine is slow to boot up and very sluggish in doing so. My theory is that the finger print reader is timing out due to this slowness because if I wait a long time for the machine to be fully stable and calm, I rarely have issues with it reading my fingerprint correctly.

Obviously, I'm now off warranty so sending it in again isn't really an option (and I have nothing concrete to justify doing so... its just always seemed way off performance wise compared to the machine specs). Anyone got any suggestions/ideas of things to look at and/or tweak either software, OS or even in bios? (Yes, I know the OLED 4k Display is going to struggle even with a RTI 2080 in it... the performance/sluggishness I'm referring to isn't FPS/game specific.)

 

Benchmarks like 3dmark or games, then programs like DPC latency checker can see if something is going on latency wise.

 

Sounds like a bad HDD/SSD/NVME drive to me.
Whats telling is that it is slow to boot.
Do you have a different drive you can put in it (of course take out the one currently in it to test correctly, even as a D or E drive it will slow the boot process).

I have a older spare lappy with a 5400 rpm HDD in it and every time I fire it up I'm like ....oh dear gawd, c'mon.
Yea, it's like that.

 

Good point, what did you spec it with?

 

It has a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus PCIe NVMe SSD
Memory wise: 32GB DDR4 2666MHz/PC4 21300 (16G X 2) Dual-Channel

 

3dmark is clocking in at 7330 which is between a 2020 gaming laptop and gaming pc (so where it should be)
DPCL - no spikes (so far)

 

Probably time to pull up task manager and see if something is hogging processor cycles or disk read/writes.
How's the temps ?
If it runs hot the processor will scale down slower.

 

Even on bootup its sluggish. Not saying I never have temperature throttling, the RTX2070 is pushing thermal limits for laptops but dont think that's causing my issues. I usually let it run max performance/max fans just to give it a thermal buffer.

 

It's hard to judge, what are your idle frequencies?

 

Assuming you're running windows.

Go into the MSCONFIG and try a selective boot to see fi it's something installed causing the lag.

Check the services tab for things that don't look familiar and disable them.

Go into task manager / startup and disable anything you don't need to be launched during startup.

 

Very true, a clean install is worth a go too.

 

Hey, if you're still out there.
Something came up in another thread that made me think of your slower than normal system.
Check to see if disk encryption is enabled...it's in 'bit locker' and might also show in the properties for the system drive.
It's definitely worth a look and would definitely cause the issue you're having.
Sometimes bit locker is hard to access, if so do the 'god mode' control panel thing...instructions are all over the interwebz on how to do it.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...s-automatically-x.836611/page-2#post-11112754

bitlocker thread - is you're using an MS account and not a local login it enables BL encryption upon 1st login and will cause a slow experience.

 

Oh joy Microsoft, more fun and games.

 

Nothing new there!

MS Account = M$py (local accounts rule!!!)

Never tie your actual security to an online provider! i.e. Chrome reports I have 160+ PW breaches and to change PW's.... nothing is secure anymore unless it's local.

 

I do use an offline password manager.

 

Password manager vs local account isn't the same thing.

What I'm getting to here is that don't use the "microsoft account" ties to an online account to login to your PC. Besides the disk encryption issue there's more likely issues that haven't been discussed. Not to mention if your "online account" gets hacked and the password gets changed you could potentially get locked out of your PC.

 

People will usually find easier ways in than through the microsoft account system though I have found.

A lot of what I see is your basic 365 fake login screen and getting people's passwords. Otherwise its a third party software like a password manager or firmware update for a firewall.

 

When you really want to get into the disks for data you just use a LiveCD image and bypass MS altogether.

The issue with tying the account to an internet based account is it's susceptible to so many other issues. For instance you referenced 360 fake pages / 3rd party software.

There's a reason your bank doesn't let you login via google / microsoft / facebook. I had Chase force a PW / UN change due to a cracked account after some suspicious online activity they noticed. I traced it back to some program I was trying to install being infected with some malware in the installer resulting in me changing every financial PW after killing the software issue. Only a couple of FI's locked accounts so, the software didn't get very far in accessing sites but, it did trip the alarms.

Seeing as though a good amount of people don't keep backups of what's on their PC it seems a bit risky to add that 3rd party connection to vital data. For stuff I couldn't care less about I just use an SSO connection and others I use a random PW generator for. I use biometrics on my phone for keeping it simple instead of pulling up PW's after the 1st login. It would be much simpler with a HW authenticator whether a USB key / phone app / NFC tap / SIM . Some options on some laptops have finger print readers built in which would be ideal.

 

If you really NEED a password manager, I highly recommend a pad of post-it notes.
Just write the crap down and throw it on your desk.
It's a magnitude of order safer than anything on your computer.
For heightened security toss the notes in a drawer.....bam, done.

 

And if you don't carry the drawer with you?

For some stuff I'll use an online spreadsheet w/ coded entries... for local files I'll use unsaved files that can't be scraped similar to your post-it pad idea. Notepad++ retains info across reboots but, the actual file isn't saved if that makes sense.

 

Keepass and an acceptance you can only do so much a backups of anything important are the way to go.