Thinkpads Forum

Hello, I've been using my ThinkPad T60p for a while now, but it feels awfully slow... I'm not too sure if it's supposed to feel like this?

Specs:
128GB SSD
Intel Core 2 Duo T7400
4 GB of RAM
ATI FireGL V5200
1400x1050 Screen
Windows 7 Ultimate

Awfuly slow compared to what?

It will load in about a minute, programs will load pretty quick with the SSD.

W7 is a more bloated os than XP so it will run slower.

CPUs rarely run at 100% for day to day whatever, so that's not the bottleneck.

You've got the 2nd best processor you put in there, but again, not 100% cpu, it's got a bit more L2 cache but is that ever really noticeable?

Your bottleneck is the bus/ram speed. It's 667mhz. It's most noticeable on things like web surfing, loading pages.

I have a t60 setup that is basically yours, except for the IPS screen. It's comfortable faster than my Intel Atom 1.3/1.8 CPU, but I'm sure that if my Atom had 2gb of ram instead of just 1gb, my Atom would feel faster than the T60 because the Atom has a 1333mhz bus speed and 2gb of ram is closer to the 3gb that the t60 actually uses. Had a t500 for a bit with w7 and 8gb of ram. It was much faster doing the little things, but didn't like the form factor or W7, which has a worse dark mode than W8, and I couldn't make a decent dark mode like I did with XP.

If websurfing is your primary task, I'd recommend puting a portable install on a RamDrive. I do it for Opera 12, only because it's a 60mb browser fully installed and it does help, and 3gb - 60mb isn't much. Chrome requires at least 1gb of space, and I'm not willing to give up 1gb of ram.

fefrie wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 27, 2019 5:37 pm

CPUs rarely run at 100% for day to day whatever, so that's not the bottleneck.

You might be surprised how quickly the modern web can bring a Core 2 Duo to 100% (both cores).

fefrie wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 27, 2019 5:37 pm

Your bottleneck is the bus/ram speed. It's 667mhz. It's most noticeable on things like web surfing, loading pages.

This may be, but it'll still look like it's CPU-bound, especially since CPU and RAM bus are tightly coupled in every architecture.

For office type stuff, the T60p is still very fast, but modern web pages are hogs. Check to see if you are running out of ram --- unfortunately, 3 GB is the most it can use. (This is a major advantage of the Frankenpads, which can use 8 GB).

It's quite likely that it's a combination of most (if not all) of the aforementioned issues Heck, I'd even add my own: SATA I speed (150MB/s) due to chipset limitation (ICH7M southbridge).

The web and web browsers.

You can try a light browser like Flashpeak Slimjet. With Slimjet I was able to use the web with my Z60m and that has single core Pentium M.

You could upgrade to a T7600, but I dont know how much that would get you since you already have a T7400.
My general suggestion would be to consider loading a linux distribution such as debian and running lightweight desktop (MATE, XFCE, etc).

The suggestion to use a lighter weight web browser is a good one, but the best thing you can do right now is to consider switching to Linux. To be clear, Linux isnt intrinsically faster or slower than windows, but you will have the option of running a lighter weight desktop environment and there are (in my opinion) more lightweight browser choices on linux.

It's very hard to tell what might seem "slow" to the OP without more details. I'm running Windows 7 on a T60P T7600 with 3GB RAM and a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT HDD (one of their earlier hybrid models).

I don't find it too slow for most tasks. But that's all relative. It's not my main machine. And I've tweaked Windows 7 to make it run faster and with less overhead. When browsing, I run uMatrix and uBlock using whitelists so that my browser doesn't run any scripting or Flash or Java or anything else without my telling it to.

I doubt Windows XP would make much difference. My guess is that there's probably something specific slowing down the machine - a service, an indexing activity, a broken virus scanner, an actual virus, some kind of network scanner, huge mounds of crappy JavaScript on websites, a poor network connection, a bad cable slowing down Internet access, etc, etc. But who knows?

I also agree with most of what's been said, especially that modern web is a hog.

I keep looking out for and trying alternative browsers, but I keep coming back to Firefox. Mostly because of the plug ins. I personally run NoScript and RequestPolicy (among others), but this is going to be too confusing for most people. A good alternative for mere mortals would be uBlock Origin, which blocks the majority of the crap while being much more user friendly (basically it just does it's thing without any intervention from you).

Strongly also recommend using GNU/Linux (I recommend Debian), with a lightweight Desktop Environment such as XFCE. This is what I run on my daily driver t60s and it works fine for everything I mostly use it for (terminal, Emacs, web browsing, etc.) with the caveat that java heavy sites (unfortunately most big corporate type sites nowadays) will tend to slow it down a bit. But personally I am allergic to those type of sites, anyway, for a whole plethora of reasons...

Having said all of that, we are somewhat speculating, as OP has not returned to provide further details of what they mean by "slow" which can be quite subjective...

Ok... So i removed Google Chrome and installed Firefox with DuckDuckGo as the browser and an adblocker. This has made a HUGE difference in performance; I can actually play 720p and some 1080p video now I also did a general cleanup of Windows (virus scan, registry clean, hard drive cleanup, etc. Thanks for all of the advice, I think Firefox over Chrome has made the biggest difference.

For whatever strange reason, I had to disable windows updates on my T60p when I had it, for whatever reason it would always ramp up CPU cycles and make everything painfully slow.

Raidriar wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 09, 2019 11:14 pm

For whatever strange reason, I had to disable windows updates on my T60p when I had it, for whatever reason it would always ramp up CPU cycles and make everything painfully slow.

There was a period of time when Windows Update was broken and would never finish updating on some Win 7 systems. And there were some versions of Windows Update that seemed to cause some CPUs to run wild. I was never clear on what caused these issues. But I weathered through those crappy periods and my T60p just updated again today, and everything went smoothly. My CPU does not run off unexpectedly. I personally think it is unwise to run Windows 7 without the latest updates, though I know that some people believe their systems are secure - or at least, more secure from Micro$oft's prying eyes - without them.

pkiff wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 10, 2019 12:58 pm

Raidriar wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 09, 2019 11:14 pm

For whatever strange reason, I had to disable windows updates on my T60p when I had it, for whatever reason it would always ramp up CPU cycles and make everything painfully slow.

There was a period of time when Windows Update was broken and would never finish updating on some Win 7 systems. And there were some versions of Windows Update that seemed to cause some CPUs to run wild. I was never clear on what caused these issues. But I weathered through those crappy periods and my T60p just updated again today, and everything went smoothly. My CPU does not run off unexpectedly. I personally think it is unwise to run Windows 7 without the latest updates, though I know that some people believe their systems are secure - or at least, more secure from Micro$oft's prying eyes - without them.

I am not part of that latter camp, I always keep my systems updated but it would never successfully finish on my T60p no matter how long I left it alone, no matter how many times I reinstalled windows. My T61p has no such troubles, it was just a freak incident perhaps

Raidriar wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 11, 2019 10:55 pm

pkiff wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 10, 2019 12:58 pm

There was a period of time when Windows Update was broken and would never finish updating on some Win 7 systems. And there were some versions of Windows Update that seemed to cause some CPUs to run wild. I was never clear on what caused these issues. But I weathered through those crappy periods and my T60p just updated again today, and everything went smoothly. My CPU does not run off unexpectedly. I personally think it is unwise to run Windows 7 without the latest updates, though I know that some people believe their systems are secure - or at least, more secure from Micro$oft's prying eyes - without them.

I am not part of that latter camp, I always keep my systems updated but it would never successfully finish on my T60p no matter how long I left it alone, no matter how many times I reinstalled windows. My T61p has no such troubles, it was just a freak incident perhaps

I've used WSUS Offline Update for more than 10 years now, and it neatly sidesteps most of the updating issues mentioned and filters out known bad updates. No install required just unzip and copy and paste the folder to the root of your C:\ drive. The two files you launch afterwards are UpdateGenerator.exe to download the updates to your drive, and then UpdateInstaller.exe found in the 'client' folder to apply them when ready to do so. The documentation page gives a basic idea of how it looks and works http://www.wsusoffline.net/docs/

http://download.wsusoffline.net/

http://download.wsusoffline.net/wsusoffline1173.zip * Latest download link

* The ESR version is for XP only, and is a legacy version that is occasionally updated (last one was in June 2019)

Ok, so it turns out the CPU will stick to it's lowest multiplier when there is not battery installed.

Ahhh! Thanks for posting a follow-up to let us know.