Slow Series 9

I received a Samsung Series 9 (900X) laptop recently, and while it's beautiful, there's a little issue of performance. The GPU seems fine; I've been able to play games like Civilization V and Skyrim about as well as can be expected from an integrated GPU. There are some hiccups, but I think that they can be blamed on the actual issue.

Opening up the task manager, I often see that the Disk utilization is around 100%, which explains some hiccups. For example, as I'm typing right now, I checked utilization, and it was at 2%. I clicked the IE icon, prompting W8 to show me the different tabs open, and it hiccupped. I switched to task manager and after a second it showed me that disk utilization by "System" was at 90%, with the whole computer at 100%. After a few seconds, it dropped back down.

I don't recall completely, but I believe that some of the host processes can likewise cause issues by using ungodly amounts of disk bandwidth. System is definitely the primary culprit, though.

I placed this in the Samsung forums because I used to have a Vaio Z, which, similarly, had a small SSD, a two-core i5 processor (admittedly, not low-voltage), etc. With two years of progress, I'd have expected the Series 9 to match performance, and that it doesn't leads me to think that Samsung screwed something up. Especially with the disk thing. SSDs are supposed to be very fast, and I get slowdowns like I didn't get on a desktop a decade ago. Anyone have a similar issue and come across any potential fixes?

Since bloatware is an obvious culprit: The one I got seemed to be Microsoft Signature, meaning that apart from MS software (like MS Office Preview), bloatware was almost nonexistent. I looked through the installed programs and it seemed like it was almost purely legitimate drivers. So I didn't bother with a reinstallation.

Thanks in advance.

 

I presume you have the 13.3" Series 9 which has 4GB RAM. If I'm not correct, please advise your model.

Is Intellimemory installed? If so, uninstall it. It is meant to be a caching program to improve performance but it is a memory hog and, when combined with the Sandisk U100 SSD (which chokes on concurrent reading and writing), slows the whole system (again, I'm assuming that you have this SSD, if not please advise which).

John

 

Yep, checked, that's the correct drive. And, yes, 13.3" with 4GB RAM.

I refreshed everything because I noticed that Windows Defender wasn't turning on, so I thought maybe I had a malware problem. Same problem post-refresh. I uninstalled intellimemory, but because the computer is newly-refreshed, I don't know whether it fixed it; I have "Windows Module Installer Worker", "System" and "Service Host: Local System (15)" collectively taking up ~95% of the disk bandwidth. Maybe it'll settle down in an hour or so.

 

Give us an update after Windows has had enough time to do any housekeeping.

The U100 is the main bottleneck on this system and the time may come when you want to read this thread and treat yourself to a bigger and better SSD.

John

 

Yeah, it seems to have fixed it. It's now possible to get some work done. Improved gaming performance, too; I used to have periodic freeze-ups that I just assumed were due to heat-induced GPU throttling, but it greatly lessened the problem.

I don't want to go about upgrading it, as though 90GB is a bit small, I think I'll get by using usb drives (probably my biggest disappointment was realizing that I couldn't just leave an sd card in the computer for expanded memory), and I don't expect to do much that would require an excessively fast SSD. Still quite a bit faster than an HDD, I'd wager.

Thank you muchly. I can't believe that Samsung would include software that causes a performance hit and does nothing else. And that Microsoft would let that through their Signature program. I'll keep the link, just in case the ssd gets to me.

 

Thanks for the update. Intellimemory might improve performance on a computer with an HDD and 8GB RAM, but doesn't make sense on the 13" Series 9.

You can use one of these in the SD card slot to avoid the card sticking out of the slot. Be forewarned, however, that the speed of the SD card slot isn't very fast. It shows up in Device Manager as a USB device.

John