Thinkpads Forum

I was investigating what was causing my Vista bootup to be so slow. The hard disk seems to be the main bottleneck on bootup so I was looking for ways to reduce disk thrashing without disabling beneficial Vista services like Superfetch and indexing. I ended up doing the following:

1. Reboot your system and leave it at the desktop until the hard disk stops thrashing (5-10 minutes on my machine).

2. Go to the Task Manager, click the button "Show processes from all users" and go to View > Show Columns and add the columns "IO Read Bytes" and "IO Write Bytes". This will allow you to see how many bytes each process has read and written to the hard drive.

Two processes stuck out: tvt_registry_svc.exe and logmon.exe, both of which are associated with Lenovo Rescue & Recovery. Between them they were reading over 300 MB of data on my system within a few minutes of booting up. This causes a big slowdown because the hard disk is already being taxed 100% by the loading of many Vista services, Superfetch, indexing etc.

For backup I will begin to use Vista's built-in Backup and Restore Center instead of Rescue and Recovery.

Post about any other processes you've found that read or write an excessive amount of data.

Hmm...

Does uninstalling it in windows interrupt/disrupt the ThinkVantage System Restore (the one you can run from startup)?

Rescue and Recovery 3 saved my A** a few times when windows was giving me BSODs at startup. All I did was press the power button, it asked me "It seems that your computer is having trouble starting properly. Would you like us to try to fix this - Yes ; No". 30 seconds later, Vista started again. No need to lose all of my data, reformat, install Vista again, and install all of my programs again. Time saved: about 5 hours. Let's see Windows' System Restore try to do that!

You can see why I'm concerned about losing this function.

I just did a RnR Custom Install than instituted a bunch of the vista tweaks from: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3945 (esp TuneXP)

And have found that my boot times are unbelievably fast now

Trekk69 wrote:I just did a RnR Custom Install than instituted a bunch of the vista tweaks from: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3945 (esp TuneXP)

And have found that my boot times are unbelievably fast now

A few months ago, I bought my daughter an X61T. In the meantime, she has spent two months - without internet access - in a foreign country, and came back for xmas vacation with one BIG complaint: the system (a 1Gb mach) is SLOW at all times, on startup, on execution, on shutting down. I looked at the referenced append, followed the guidelines in the link kindly provided, and found only marginal relief. Since there were plenty of Windows updates to install, I decided it was high time to avail myself of the ThinkVantage System Update to put everything to rights.

The experience was ludicrous, to say the least:
1. I chose to install all updates; the first time it got to the BIOS update, it asked me whether I wanted to update the BIOS or the model number (???), I said ok to the BIOS, told me that "the driver failed".
2. I went back to the update, to find that it had installed only a few out of the 26 recommended. So I had another go, and this time, when it got back to the BIOS, everything ran smoothly until it told me that it could not do the needed restart because System Update would not let it!! hmmm... ThinkVantage System Update tripping over itself.
3. I am stubborn, back in I went once more; the BIOS update had gone through but all others had to be downloaded and installed once again. But, this time, when it got to Rescue and Recovery update, it showed me the Windows Wizard pop-up ... hmmm, is that not the kind of thing that ThinkVantage System Update is supposed to hide under the covers, thought I? The disk activity light flickered solidly for about 20 mins, and then finally rested, but the pop-up was still there! hmmm... pity Rescue and Recovery could not rescue or recover itself from that quandary. This time it had to be an old-fashioned power-off.
4. I am stubborn, but not 100% naive, so I forewent the possibility of installing the six remaining updates.
5. In the meantime, whenever I had to restart the system, ThinkVantage Access Connections told me it had found an "unknown ethernet adaptor" (!), would I care to do something or other, or cancel, and I naturally chose cancel.

Maybe the ThinkVantage System Update package should instead be named ThinkDisadvantage System Update. Or maybe it is the whole ThinkVantage concept and/or implementation that has gone awry ...

So now I plan on uninstalling ThinkVantage Access Connections, ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery, ThinkVantage Power something, one at a time, and see if I can get some decent performance out of the box. And please, no replies telling me to upgrade the system to 2Gb, since Lenovo is supposed to sell working setups, not virtual ones.

SUGGESTION:
But, in the meantime, I do have a modest, sincere, and quite reasonable suggestion to make to Lenovo: please sell me an X61T, with half the RAM, half the disk size, and a Linux distribution with all the open-sourced hardware drivers needed to show off this little machine.
Believe me, I shall send you my credit card number five minutes after you announce product availability.
In the meantime, please stop putting Windows-powered lame ducks on the marketplace: they are an insult to IBM, to Lenovo, and to customers like you and me.

@ Vasco Almeida

Would you think of doing a complete reinstall, just to clear everything up and start from fresh?
And 1Gb of ram with Vista is not enough for it to run smoothly. Extra ram is so cheap these days anyways.
Anyway, hope all turns out alright for you, your daughter, and the X61

Trekk69 wrote:@ Vasco Almeida

Would you think of doing a complete reinstall, just to ...

Thank you for your support, Trekk69, but no complete reinstall for me: I have uninstalled ThinkVantage Update, Access Connections,
Power Manager, plus Rescue and Recovery. Now I get 3.5 minutes from hitting Restart to wired connection availability. Enough time wasted on this for me ...

In the beginning of the year I gave up Windows, in favour of Linux and believe me, nothing will lure me back.

But thanks all the same.