Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

New to the forum. So - replaced my old old R32 with an X61 w/ Windows Vista Business. It's a Core 2 Duo 2GHz with 2GB of RAM - but it seems terribly slow. I've only turned it on 3 or 4 times so far, but in all cases the hard drive has been churning non-stop, sometimes for 20 or 30 minutes straight. Firefox takes 10 or 15 seconds or so to load, rather than 2 or 3 on a similarly spec'ed computer.

I'm just a little worried that either something is wrong, or the speed is being throttled by some setting I am unaware of.

Oh, this might be pertinent - I've been running it on battery only, rather than plugged in. However, clicking on 'My Computer' suggests that the CPU is running at 2.00 GHz.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

scrawledinwax wrote:Hi all,

New to the forum. So - replaced my old old R32 with an X61 w/ Windows Vista Business. It's a Core 2 Duo 2GHz with 2GB of RAM - but it seems terribly slow. I've only turned it on 3 or 4 times so far, but in all cases the hard drive has been churning non-stop, sometimes for 20 or 30 minutes straight. Firefox takes 10 or 15 seconds or so to load, rather than 2 or 3 on a similarly spec'ed computer.

Oh, this might be pertinent - I've been running it on battery only, rather than plugged in. However, clicking on 'My Computer' suggests that the CPU is running at 2.00 GHz.

I've been running Visa on two or three ThinkPads with from lower end hardware to core duo. All have 2 gig of RAM. Speed is decent on all of them, but I do some special things to make them run faster. (those tips near the end of this reply)

Check your ThinkPad Power Management and set it to High Performance and see if that helps. Try running the machine on A/C and High Performance for comparison.

How many Documents files do you have? If there thousands, Indexing will run quite a bit till the database is created. The hard drive will thrash a lot till this is finished. You can also get into Indexing and uncheck areas you don't care to index just yet, and add things later.

Superfetch takes a while to"settle in" on Vista, then things will speed up a tad.

Speed tips:
1. Dump the fancy Vista GUI and switch to Classis mode in all settings. This will take much of the load off the processor which has to work like heck to just keep the desktop up. The simpler Classic look is also easier on your eye and brain because it isn't necessary to mentally sort thru the complex look of the desktop.

2. Ditch the Aero and Sidebar unless you just like them so much that you want to keep them running.

3. Make sure the Windows computer performance is set to "Performance" rather than "let windows decide". Performance mode is much faster on Vista, just like it is in XP.

4. Get rid of any desktop backgrounds or wallpapers and just use a single solid background color. Again, less work for the processor.

On my three Vista machines, speed is down a little but not a lot. The computers run 2-5 deg hotter with Vista due to higher processor load, and the hard drives run only a little more after "settling in".

I have two hard drives for each machine, and I can run Vista or XP any time I chose. I prefer XP currently because Vista will not run some programs I like. If all you have is Vista, just do a little adjusting and you will be fine.

"my computer" will not tell you the speed your processor is currently running at. Vista has fairly advanced power saving features and if you are running it on battery chances are the CPU is running at a much lower clock speed. You need to configure your power saving features if you want performance rather than portability.

I've also read that Vista will index the hard drive like crazy for the first couple days/week of use as it learns your habits.

I have had no complaints with speed with my 1.4GHz x61s/2GB/Vista home basic. It is most definitely faster than my X60s/1GB/XP.

I've not used Vista yet, but what I've gathered from people on the forums is that Vista takes about 2 weeks of normal use to " settle down." What it's doing is caching all of the files you normally use in a certain way so as to speed things up in the future.

Sounds backwards, I know, but everyone says it calms down after about 2 weeks - so don't worry.

Also I read that there are some new Vista patches coming out that should speed operation up more on top of the "settled down" speed.

The X61 is not the problem - it's Vista (and it will go away soon enough).

scrawledinwax wrote:New to the forum. So - replaced my old old R32 with an X61 w/ Windows Vista Business. It's a Core 2 Duo 2GHz with 2GB of RAM - but it seems terribly slow. I've only turned it on 3 or 4 times so far, but in all cases the hard drive has been churning non-stop, sometimes for 20 or 30 minutes straight.

Disk churning non-stop (and Firefox taking 10+ seconds to start) definitely points to disk contention issues rather than to CPU power profile, Aero or any other CPU-related thing.

mgo wrote: How many Documents files do you have? If there thousands, Indexing will run quite a bit till the database is created. The hard drive will thrash a lot till this is finished. You can also get into Indexing and uncheck areas you don't care to index just yet, and add things later.

I think mgo's suggestion is the most likely one. Either reduce the documents to be indexed, or leave the X61 on overnight to allow it to do its thing and get the index built.

mgo wrote: Either reduce the documents to be indexed, or leave the X61 on overnight to allow it to do its thing and get the index built.

That was exactly what I was trying to find out. Say I fill my new system with apx. 10 GB photos, 10 GB my own films/videos and about 3 GB of office/adobe files and leave all that over night... I suppose that even if I leave indexing on over night and superfetch for good, once these two are "finished" indexing, these files will be fast to search and if there are no changes, indexing will eventually stop? And just index new/added/changed files.
Am I correct?

In addition to the good comments posted, I think "X" models are restricted to slow hard drives. I have a 7200-rpm drive in my "T" and I simply won't return to less because of the performance penalty. I have tested two "T" machines each with fast and slow drives to compare, and (in addition to the above comments) slow drive cause symptoms like yours. ... JDH

Thanks for all the replies. I had heard that Vista takes a while to warm up, so I think I'll wait a couple of weeks to figure out if it's just indexing or if something's off. It seems that one shouldn't really have to turn off Aero etc. on a midrange machine w/ 2gb of RAM - what's the point of getting a higher-end machine then?

Will post an update once I have come to some conclusions.

-Nav

I don't think that a lot of the Vista features need to be turned off, but some may need to be toned down when using battery. The processors on the "s" models certainly have enough juice to run Vista adequately, especially including the new integrated video.

@jdhurst, the X's are available with faster hard drives. Looking back, I would have ordered a 7200 RPM drive instead of the 5400. I probably could have changed it given my extremely long ordering to delivery time, but with Lenovo, I didn't want to risk it.

The new 7K200 installed into my X61 quite easily (once I followed the right set of instructions for cloning a Vista disk with Acronis TrueImage). Speed! Power! Capacity!

jamess wrote:That was exactly what I was trying to find out. Say I fill my new system with apx. 10 GB photos, 10 GB my own films/videos and about 3 GB of office/adobe files and leave all that over night... I suppose that even if I leave indexing on over night and superfetch for good, once these two are "finished" indexing, these files will be fast to search and if there are no changes, indexing will eventually stop? And just index new/added/changed files.
Am I correct?

That's correct. The photos and videos won't take that long to index, but the Office and Acrobat files will take a while.