Thinkpads Forum

Don't get me wrong--I haven't bought a non-Thinkpad laptop in nearly 20 years. I've got a whole closet full of older models gathering dust. But I recently decided to upgrade from my trust X200 to an X220. I decided to do this because I was worried about support for Windows XP running out and wanted to make sure future software I got would be compatible. I didn't want to go to a higher X model because I really love the traditional Thinkpad keyboard and from what I read the X220 was one of the last to feature it.

Anyone, the one I bought is model 42904E1 i5 2.6GHz 4GB 320GB (7200) with Windows 7 64.

The 200 I upgraded from wasn't one of the fastest ones.

While I like the X220, I'm a little disappointed in the performance. I really was expecting much faster startup, shutdown and completion of labor intensive tasks. For example, I use Adobe InDesign and do a lot of converting of InDesign books to Kindle mobi files. This is a long process, but I've found it takes even longer with the X220 than it did with X200. And going into hibernation takes nearly a minute compared to 30 seconds with the X200. Note that I'm running solely on AC, with no battery installed.

Now, I have turned off every possible service and function (i.e., Bluetooth, camera, wireless, network stuff) I don't use. I've shut off screensavers and any other obvious memory hogs. It's still slow. Now, I admit I've got Turboboost disabled (because it makes the fan so loud it's like a jet engine and I'm concerned about overheating) but the power setting is for fast performance.

I mean I can live with this, and most of my tasks are so routine they don't need extra performance power. But I was wondering whether upgrading from 4mb to 8mb RAM will make a difference (I've never noticed it making much with other PCs) or using the function that lets it tap the memory of a USB stick would help at all?

If you want faster performance, you should upgrade the necessary parts. A different machine won't make any difference if it has similar specs. First of all, you should consider an SSD instead of an HDD. They offer the biggest gain in performance. Next, try Win 8. I have found it to be much more responsive, quicker, and efficient than Win 7.

Why am I not feeling the "love" for the X220?
SSD and more RAM. Add them.
I don't understand why a power user like you would stay with the poor performing stock hard drive.

My X220i boots in under 20 seconds with the mSATA SSD. As others have said, a hard drive is no match for a SSD performance wise. Using the mSATA SSD, you can keep the hard drive for storage if you like.

Summilux wrote:SSD and more RAM. Add them.
I don't understand why a power user like you would stay with the poor performing stock hard drive.

But the puzzle here is that the X220 is actually much slower than the OP's previous laptop, an X200, which presumably also had a standard HDD and no more than 4GB of RAM, and it was Core2 Duo. I suspect this is software-related. raisindot, have you tried doing a clean install of the operating system? It's also worth checking the performance setting in the BIOS. Perhaps your X200 was set to "Maximum performance" while the X220 was set to "Maximum battery".

pianowizard wrote:
But the puzzle here is that the X220 is actually much slower than the OP's previous laptop, an X200, which presumably also had a standard HDD and no more than 4GB of RAM, and it was Core2 Duo. I suspect this is software-related. raisindot, have you tried doing a clean install of the operating system? It's also worth checking the performance setting in the BIOS. Perhaps your X200 was set to "Maximum performance" while the X220 was set to "Maximum battery".

Thank you, Pianowizard, for addressing my original question, instead of responding with the typical "I can't believe you..." type remark. I haven't tried doing a clean install of the OS because it didn't come on disk and I'm not sure how to do it anyway plus the thought of reinstalling all this stuff is painful. SSD would be nice, but I have no idea how to migrate everything (including the OS) from my current system to an SSD and if this would result in everything not working correctly. I'd rather try to see what I can do with my existing setup with the least amount of extra $$$ and rejiggering time needed. It's not bad as it is, it's just not the huge performance jump I expected.

raisindot wrote:And going into hibernation takes nearly a minute compared to 30 seconds with the X200.

Now this may very well be because you have more RAM in X220 than the X200. Hibernation is essentially copying the entire content of RAM to hard drive, therefore given similar HDD write speeds, double RAM means double hibernation time.

twistero wrote:

raisindot wrote:And going into hibernation takes nearly a minute compared to 30 seconds with the X200.

Now this may very well be because you have more RAM in X220 than the X200. Hibernation is essentially copying the entire content of RAM to hard drive, therefore given similar HDD write speeds, double RAM means double hibernation time.

Actually, I had upgraded my old X200 to 4mb RAM. But since some of the programs I'm using with the 220 are different (i.e., different anti-virus software) and since the Thinkpad utilities are different (and my consume more RAM) maybe this is contributing to the "RAM overhead".

Well, the slowdowns you describe sound like one of two things: you bought the X220 second hand with an existing Windows install and it's slowed down with prior use. Or, if it's not that, then the hard drive is slower than the one you had before. 4 GB of RAM is likely fine unless the applications you use are taking 3 GB themselves.

Either way, I would do an SSD upgrade. Having had an SSD in my main PC and secondary laptop since the end of 2009 I now find any machine without an SSD to feel slow. In the ThinkPads I have, X200s with SSD and X61T with a mechanical disk, both with clean Linux installations, the difference is huge on suspend/boot/large application load.

Doing the SSD upgrade: you mention XP then ReadyBoost, so I'm not sure if you have Windows 7 on both machines or not? If you're running Windows 7 the SSD upgrade is quite easy: you resize your existing Windows partition to ensure it's smaller than the SSD you're going to install. Then you use Windows backup to make an image of the entire system. For the backup you need a USB hard drive, or a spare hard drive plus a SATA to USB adapter. The drive for the backup has to be big enough for your entire data, but not the partition size.
In the meantime you use the Microsoft tool to make a bootable USB installer on a USB flash drive, if you don't have a Windows 7 disk the Windows 7 ISOs can be legally downloaded from Microsoft's digitalriver site.

Then you install the SSD, boot of the USB flash drive into the Windows installer, connect the drive with the backup on it, and at an early point of the Windows installer you choose to restore from backup. The installer does the rest. All of your programmes, documents settings etc. are kept. If you don't like it or there's an error, you can always reinsert your original hard drive.

I did this procedure on a friend's laptop (not a ThinkPad), was the typical five year old slowed to a crawl Windows laptop. I couldn't face the days of effort to do a clean install, even though I suspected this backup & restore wouldn't get the most our of the SSD. Well, it made a huge difference. And now that I know to rezise the partition to < SSD size before the backup (and you can increase the partition to full size on the SSD once installed), it's actually only 10 minutes of your effort to do it. I'm not generally a Microsoft fan, mainly use Linux with Windows installs for specific uses only, but have to say that Microsoft have provided a very straightforward backup & restore process within Windows 7

Have you removed/disabled the preinstalled bloatware ? That's probably the source of performance issues. I can not complain about X220 performance at all (i5, 8 GB RAM expanded by second Lenovo 4 GB module, 7200 rpm HDD). I don't have installed any resident anti-virus (I use permission/account/SRP based security), disabled Windows Defender, disabled SuperFetch service, uninstalled Lenovo RapidBoot (important !) etc.

Going to hibernation takes less than 30 seconds and restoration is even faster. BIOS version 1.38, don't know whether it makes a difference. There are another issues I can complain related to build quality. The display bezel starting to fall appart after first year of usage.

As for boot times, my old X31 (Windows XP SP3, 768 MB RAM, slow 4200 rpm HDD):
- going to hibernate: 14 sec
- restore from hibernation: 15 sec
- boot time (past BIOS screen to Windows logon dialog): 36 sec

I personally agree with removing anything you don't need that came my default. Most of the Lenovo tools you'll probably never use (such as Access Connections and Security Solution) and are just taking up space and resources doing nothing.

I wouldn't be quick to jump on replacing the drive either, I can assure you that the drive can't suck as bad as you describe unless it's either a Western Digital Green drive, and I don't believe Lenovo would be stupid enough to actually use them.

Right next to that I would just do a clean install of Windows, if you can hunt down a copy of 7 or 8, depending on which your Thinkpad has, then only reinstall drivers. I, myself, don't recommend using the stock install of anything on a new computer due to the ammount of crapware OEMs install.

I have been quite disappointed with the performance of the stock Lenovo Windows 7 image on xx2x and xx3x series machines... especially on machines with SSDs! I have re-installed from scratch (in uEFI/GPT mode) with great results.

After trying a few times to cope with the stock Lenovo Windows install, I've realised that the best solution is to always nuke it and do a fresh install without the bloat, reinstalling only what is needed / may be useful, aside from system drivers.

Put a SSD in there. SSDs prices have gotten low enough to recommend them to everyone (unless you need 1TB+ on a laptop).

I too upgraded from a X200 to X220. I installed SSD on both, but the SATA speed on the X200 bottle necked the SSD (X200 supports only 1.5Gbps). With the same SSD, my X220 boots up significantly faster. Not to mention it has a faster CPU and much longer battery life. The IPS LCD on my X220 is also much better than the AFFS LCD I put into my X200 as well. I'd definitely say that X220 is a big upgrade from X200.

Btw, I just got assigned a non-SSD T430 at work. I hate the new thinkpad keyboard and I hate going back to mechanical HDD...

It's difficult to suggest other things specific to your machine and the comparison with your old machine as we can't see it/use it and what it's running or how it's running.

Agree SSD, and especially install from scratch using a stock MS Win7 image (which I think you can download off the web to use with your licence code / product key). Then you just need the drivers which are all on the Lenovo site.

On mine the only Lenovo software running is Power Manager and Access Connections - again both are on the Lenovo site.

It should fly after that!

Hope that helps.

S