Breathing some life into a laptop

[DCBassman]

And the times are still incredibly slow compared to my much poorer-specced Dell. 1 min 15 to working desktop, including PIN input.
31 seconds to shut down.
One other thing: on the old hdd, defrag the raw installation, then retime it. A fresh install is always fragmented to hell.

 

[DCBassman]

Something is seriously crippling the machine somewhere.

 

[DCBassman]

Windows 7 not 10 as it can't upgrade due to an early type of hybrid graphics

My Dell Studio series laptops that have Radeon 34 or 3650 graphics were the same - they would not upgrade. But they WILL clean install and carry on from there, so may be worth trying?

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

I would be worried about the HDD being misidentified

I would get the current driver from the manufacturers website and install that.

Also - if you don;t use th optical drive much then you can - normally - get a caddy to hold the HDD in that and boot from a new SSD - so you have an SSD for system stuff and the old HDD for data.

I totally agree with disabling the anti virus etc and seeing if that makes a difference.

 

[aferris2]

I think windows takes some time to tune itself after the install. It certainly did when I did the update from win7. I didn't do anything more than a basic install, so no turning off of the telemetry and privacy stuff. Yes, a defragment would probably improve things further.

That's a machine thing, not W10.

Not according to This. Introduced on Win8.

 

[aferris2]

Something is seriously crippling the machine somewhere.

2 minutes for the fast-start method isn't too bad, especially as I haven't done anything to optimise it. I'm reasonably happy with this and the SSD should make it far better still. If it doesn't change things then I will have to look at disk access times (which could be hardware related)

 

[swee'pea99]

Have to say I'm with those who feel that a machine with that spec and a clean Win10 install should boot up a lot faster than that. Not sure that's helpful, but...

Be interesting to see what happens when the SSD's installed.

 

[DRM]

I have an old Lenovo ThinkPad T420, with a fresh install of W10, with no bloat, just W10 from the MS site on to a USB stick, increasing the ram from 4 to 8 GB and fitting an SSD, it boots up from hitting the start button to fully working in 20 seconds or so, not bad for 2011 laptop

 

[si_c]

My Dell Studio series laptops that have Radeon 34 or 3650 graphics were the same - they would not upgrade. But they WILL clean install and carry on from there, so may be worth trying?

Already done that with a fresh Win7 install not so long ago. It's on it's second HDD and the one I got was based on availability rather than performance which is hampering things now. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB not so long ago which helped immensely but I'll likely be putting an SSD in at some point in the near future.

That being said I rarely boot the laptop into Windows anyway, I usually boot into Archlinux instead which is my preferred working environment and that has no performance issues at all.

 

[FrankCrank]

My understanding is that CCleaner is obselete under W10. In fact, a cupla years back a W10 scheduled update suggested I remove it as it was not compatible, so I did.

 

[aferris2]

My understanding is that CCleaner is obselete under W10. In fact, a cupla years back a W10 scheduled update suggested I remove it as it was not compatible, so I did.

I very much doubt this. Possibly you had an old version that had been found to have issues with win10 at the time.

 

[DCBassman]

Already done that with a fresh Win7 install

Oh, it will be fine with that, I meant that it might not upgrade to win 10, as mine would not, but a complete wipe and fresh install of Win 10 worked and continues to work.

 

[aferris2]

Yesterday I put the laptop through a couple of benchmarking suites to get a feeling of whether there really was something seriously wrong.
Tried Userbenchmark and novabench and both gave more or less the same results. Processor, ram, and graphics were performing as expected. The HDD came out as "very poor" with my current disk and "good" for the fresh install.
Both ratings are compared against what is expected for the actual HDD. Interestingly the disk on the fresh install was much slower even with the better rating, so something must be throttling the current HDD.
Had a look at the BIOS settings and there's not a lot to select. The only thing was the SATA settings. Currently set to AHCI. Other options are IDE and RAID. Assume RAID is for multiple disks so no use in this instance, but not sure if IDE is an option. Any thoughts?
Boot order in the BIOS is HDD, DVD, USB. Dont know if this makes any difference to normal performance. Is it worth changing these?

Anyway SSD should be arriving today so lots more things to try.

 

[mistyoptic]

The only thing was the SATA settings. Currently set to AHCI. Other options are IDE and RAID. Assume RAID is for multiple disks so no use in this instance, but not sure if IDE is an option. Any thoughts??

Anyway SSD should be arriving today so lots more things to try.

IDE was the drive connection type/protocol prior to SATA. Not relevant IMO

 

[DCBassman]

Leave it on AHCI. Something on that hard drive is killing the machine. But even your clean disk install is slower than my 2 generations older Dell.
Hmmm...