Thinkpads Forum

While I’m working on couple of things like IE, downloading….outlook..Etc laptop slow down I have to like restart it I got 2GB RAM in it I also disable most of the startup items except couple of Lenovo stuff..
How can I fix this issue?
Thanks

Which OS are you using? When it's slow, was there a lot of hard drive activities?

is speedstep in play? With XP set to the laptop profile the CPU will slow down and stay down most of the time even tho it automatically goes to full speed when needed. What i find is that if you put it to "always on" the system will be running at full speed all the time but will kill your battery fast. If that doesn't matter then power away!!!

Sorry posted the specs below tried vista was real slow on this laptop even with 2GB RAM maybe with SP1 comes out things will be better..

Speedstep is auto (default in bios) you mean power scheme to always on? There is HDD activities when it's slow..For example when i run full sweep using spysweeper until it's done i leave it scanning then once it's done like i have to restart to use the laptop

well i mean speedstep that slows down the system to save power. If you're running XP then change the power profile (in Power Options) to "Always On" and then do your system tests. If it's Vista then change it to "Performance" and it'll run better.

done doesn't that just change the the time to turn off HDD, screen,...etc

When it gets slow, what's your CPU utilization like? It sounds like you have some processes running that use up your CPU and/or disk bandwidth ...

sometimes i can't even look too slow to process, shutdown...etc i use normal things like if i'm downloading two things big files something it kills me sometimes
I recently cleaned install xp from the recovery in the HDD just couple of days ago

no that's also Windows XP's version of Intel Speedstep. It's not integrated into the OS. When you have it on Portable\Laptop mode it runs the CPU at say 600mhz to help saving battery and jump up to 1.8Ghz or whatever CPU you have when a program is needing more speed than that.

So with that you'll get your laptop running at 600mhz (or whatever you lowests speedstep is) most of the time even tho you have a 2Ghz CPU. Desktops don't do this because they don't have speedstep but laptop CPUs do.

ok
I dont see any diff it feels like i have PI and 96MB RAM lol
Thanks for the fast replies

Scan for spyware/viruses, switch to Firefox, check to see if any intensive processes are running

And keep Task Manager always running so that when the system gets slow, you can simply switch to Task Manager to see what's going on, instead of having to start a new process.

I use spysweeper w/virus add on seems like great util firefox take up more memory than IE as far as i know here screen shot below

On the Processes tab of Task Manager, you can add I/O Read/Write columns. You can then tell which app is making a lot of disk access. Judging from your screenshot it doesn't seem like cpu or memory was the bottleneck.

If you are using XP, over 512MB of RAM used is too much. Try to cut it down to 100-200MB by uninstalling unnecessary applications, disable unnecessary startup process. Undoubtedly, the application that uses lots of RAM tend to take other resources as well. So you can bring down the RAM usage along with the slowness.
I suspect that you have Norton/Symantec Antivirus running. Try to uninstall them and find alternative solution like AVG.

I have the OEM apps, Office 2007, Cisco VPN client...couple of major apps i need i dont have NAV here is my startups

You may want to use an enhanced " Task Manager", known as "Process Explorer", from Microsoft (well, not really developed by M$) to get more real-time system usage details.

This is the URL to download:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... lorer.mspx

Instead of sorting the main display by CPU utilizations, try sorting by Process names and watch which one takes up CPU.

XIII wrote:If you are using XP, over 512MB of RAM used is too much. Try to cut it down to 100-200MB by uninstalling unnecessary applications, disable unnecessary startup process.

Maybe at startup ... but at the moment my X31 has a pagefile usage of 910 MB (with Outlook, Word, Acrobat, Thunderbird and Firefox running), and it runs just fine. So looking at just that number is not quite enough.

I have the almost the same configuration (except got 1GB of RAM and a slower HD) and found that Vista was slowest initially. I also did a clean install of Vista Business (with only IBM's Hard Drive Parking tool installed.)

I would give firefox a try if you haven't already done so, I found a large difference on Vista when comparing Firefox and IE7 speeds (more than I found on XP).

You can also try disabling all aero effects to see if that helps you out at all. I must admit that I only had Vista installed for a month so I'm not sure if there are new fixes. I plan to give it a try again in about 6 months as there are still a few applications that don't work perfectly,

In Short:
- Give Firefox a try (I noticed a large difference)
- Try a clean install (its what I did)
- I was thinking of upgrading to 7200rpm hard drive and 2GB of ram for my next attempt at vista.

since you are using XP and have 2gb of ram, try turning page file off. It sped me up quite a bit.

Just cleaned install IBM XP couple of days ago..7200 HDD i had one in my Dell it made the laptop warmer


In Short:
- Give Firefox a try (I noticed a large difference)
- Try a clean install (its what I did)
- I was thinking of upgrading to 7200rpm hard drive and 2GB of ram for my next attempt at vista.[/quote]

to turn off page file:

This is a quote from a user on notebookreview site (furrycute) also a member here I think.


Right click on "My Computer" icon, choose "properties," click on "Advanced" tab, click on "settings" under the performance section.

While you are at it, you might as well turn off all the fancy visual effects.

Click on "advanced" tab, click on "change" under Virtual Memory section, then choose "no paging file."


But you should only turn off paging file if you have 2gb of RAM running XP. You should have at least 3gb of RAM if you are running Vista.