Thinkpads Forum

okay, i got my x300 a couple of weeks ago. first thing i've noticed is that the fan is constantly on at 5000rpm. yes my room is hot but still... i did use tpfancontrol but increasing the temperture of the CPU decreased its performance and the system was slowing down all the time. tpfancontrol also did not seem to work as efficiently as native bios control and so i have disabled it. now what was really troubling me was that x300 for some reason would really slow down when typing inside of an Internet Explorer. it got so slow that when typing a sentance my keboard would be delayed by 2-3 seconds.
i found out that by doing the following my system became increasingly fast and much cooler.
1) use native bios settings for fan speeds
2) use Opera instead of IE7
3) disable a lot of services which you are not using
4) disable system restore and indexing
i based these changes on Blackvipers Vista Tweaks - http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm
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However, by having made a whole list of changes, you can not say what specifically did the trick.

For instance, using a different browser won't make your system run faster or cooler and the native bios setting is the default, not a change you made.

no, using opera did reduce the amount of lag when typing emails. but not as much as everything else. if you are having the same trouble with X300 you are welcomed to apply steps above one by one and post your results.

Just something that came to my mind you may want to try out in order to possibly speed up your x300: Device Manager -> Disk Drives -> "Your SSD here" -> Properties -> Policies -> Disable Advanced Performance + Disable write caching on the disk, i.e. uncheck both of them (then reboot and then reboot again to see how things go on). I just happened to try out different things right now and since you have a SSD in your X300, I believe this "trick" may make your SSD just feel better Please, post back if you feel any difference (positive or negative or both).

Thanks

Marin

i could not switch off "enable write caching." every time that i would turn off the feature and click okay whenever i came back it was still enabled.
i am wondering thou, what would enable advenced performance option do? i did enable it and the new changes were saved however i did not notice any changes to the system speed. i don't think it is humanly possible to notice changes that are less than 10% of the overall system speed.

mattbiernat wrote:i could not switch off "enable write caching." every time that i would turn off the feature and click okay whenever i came back it was still enabled.

Yup, this seems to be the case with me too. I believe it is some bug of Vista as it occurs only to the mounted HD the OS is installed on and hence the HD should be in performance mode (not for quick removal). For some reason that performance mode always requires "write caching". But the only difference it makes (at least in theory) is whether the writes to the disk get first cached and then written to the disk or immediately written to the disk. While I can understand this for my case as my HDD has 16 MB of cache, I really don´t know why this is the case with your SSD. Hence I believe it is some kind of Vista bug, but I might be well wrong. AFAIK, there was similar bug with XP and Server 2003 that seems to be still present As for "advanced perfomance" I don´t really know what it does. The only reason why I asked you to try out disabling both of them is that after disabling them (apparently only the "advanced performance" feature) my ThinkPad became noticeably more responsive and need a few seconds less to boot up I´ll try googling it and see what I come up with.

Cheers

Marin

how about this one: "enable advenced performance "
did you leave it on or off, i searched google but people seem to be confused about both disc catching and the advenced performance option.

mattbiernat wrote:how about this one: "enable advenced performance "
did you leave it on or off, i searched google but people seem to be confused about both disc catching and the advenced performance option.

It was enabled and I disabled it. Disabling it unexpectedly made everything more responsive and shortened the boot times a little bit. That´s why I thought you might be interested in it

Cheers

Marin

Update: I just disabled "write caching" and rebooted. As of now, the box "write caching" still stays unchecked. I don´t know what made the difference before for it to get "checked" on its own...

did you change your rights to admin?

Oh, sorry, I always forget to mention, I´m always logged as admin on my ThinkPad.

it says under my name that I am administrator so I guess I am too, yet I can't figure out how to disable writing to the SSD... what did you exactly do that allowed you to uncheck that option?

Well, "writing cache" wasn´t greyed out at all, so I simply unchecked the box, no other activity. The only options that are greyed out in my case are "optimize for quick removal" (box unchecked) and "optimize for performance" (box checked).

Could you post some screenshot of that?

I don´t understand. That box seemed to stay unchecked for so long time (I checked that out a few times, even rebooted a few times), but now it appeared again checked. I give up on that and I don´t know why Vista wants it checked so much...

If you have the SSD, follow OCZ's guide for optimizing SSD performance found here
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... hp?t=42487
it applies to vista and XP.

SSD's cant handle a lot of small tiny writes and hit latencies of 1-2 seconds. (intel's ssds have a proper controller and are fine, but arent out yet)

disabling superfetch in vista doesn't make sense. superfetch is used to speed up your system by preloading applications.

mattbiernat wrote:disabling superfetch in vista doesn't make sense. superfetch is used to speed up your system by preloading applications.

I can't tell any perceptible difference in how long it takes to load programs now compared to before disabling it, but I can definitely tell how disabling superfetch made a difference in how Vista performs now. It doesn't bog down opening new browser tabs like it did before, and I don't have periods of having the entire system freeze while the HDD just spins. Its purpose may have been to speed things up, but I did not find that to be true about Superfetch in my case. YMMV

JaneL wrote: I can't tell any perceptible difference in how long it takes to load programs now compared to before disabling it, but I can definitely tell how disabling superfetch made a difference in how Vista performs now. It doesn't bog down opening new browser tabs like it did before, and I don't have periods of having the entire system freeze while the HDD just spins. Its purpose may have been to speed things up, but I did not find that to be true about Superfetch in my case. YMMV

I couldn´t agree more! The superfetch/prefetch topic has been recently discussed here a few times, for some reference see here. I have observed the behavior of my Vista setup very carefully with and without superfetch enabled and I can tell for sure that it doesn´t speed things up even a bit. What is more, it steals performance and resources to no avail.

Cheers

Marin

Update to the "write caching" issue: after disabling it manually, it seems to get enabled and disabled on its own, erratically, without any obvious correlation to whatever activities on my Vista setup. As of now, I haven´t found any explanation for this behavior in internet either.

is there a registry hack which would permanently disable that? im superise that i can't find people on google having hard time disabling it. most people have hard drives and want to re-enable that.
EDIT: okay i disabled superfetch and at least boot time seems to be faster. no real difference in applications load times.

With your SSD application load times should very short (application launch should be faster than on your T60), right?

Also, I forgot to mention, in order to be able to fully enjoy the lack of prefetch/superfetch one has to disable it from the very beginning (for example right after a clean install of Vista), i.e. before having installed any additional programs. The right way to disable the prefetch/superfetch is described in the link I posted above.

Cheers

Marin

yes application times are much superior in my X300 than T60. Superisingly thou, boot up time in my x300 is 35s while in T60 is 50s. which is not that much of a difference. both systems have just about the same number of processes running and both have just about the same amount of ram.
regarding disabling write cache... i seached a lot on google and came up with this forum - http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-529168.php
there is a registry hack to make windows look at SSD as a removable drive and that way disabling the write cache. don't have time to figure it out yet.

Still 15 seconds difference in boot time is not something negligible considering the fact that the boot process of Vista is quite resource-intense. Have you checked under the configuration utility for any programs that might have put their entries to the startup (I´m referring to programs like winamp, skype, msn, icq etc that always want to add themselves to your startup entries without you actually need them there, others like Power Manager or Access Connections are Acronis need to have their startup entries though)?
The link you provided looks interesting, but I´m not sure if it will work for Vista or for a SSD too though. I´m gonna try this hack out and hope just a try won´t hurt

Cheers

Marin

yes of course, start up programs and services are removed to the usable basics for me. i don't even use lenovo power manager, access connections and other programs which are duplicates of windows programs. and vista was converted in my X300 to very light weight, at least service wise. it only uses now 777mb or ram as opposed to ~1gb before. my T60 uses about ~350mb ram as opposed to ~500 before.

The registry key in question under Vista is HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\IDE\"Your HD or SSD here"\"some string of numbers, letters and symbols"\Device Parameters\Disk -> UserWriteCacheSetting. It has value 1 and the box under Device Manager is unchecked. However, I checked out the keys related to my second HD in the ultrabay, there is one more key present there, namely Classpnp, because it´s removable unit, but UserWriteCacheSetting is also set to value 1 although my second HD has both "write caching" and "advanced performance" enabled. I´m not brave enough to play with those reg settings

Marin

changing UserWriteCache setting does nothing, it gets reset after a restart to 0. i am running out of hope here... i really don't understand thou how come some people can change the write cache in vista and others can't.

I would suggest you to abandon this topic Even if you manage somehow to change it, it´s not granted that it will bring you any performance gain at all (if not even make things "worse"). I read somewhere that this was a bug also present in Xp and Server 2003, no idea if it has been ever resolved for those platforms, but there is a chance that it hasn´t been and and was further introduced in Vista as well, who knows... There is also a chance that we are doing something very wrong resp. wasting our time with some stupid setting (in the end, Vista is a M$ OS, not like Linux where you can tweak the living $hit out of it ).

Cheers

Marin

i concur, it is a waste of time unless somebody in here has hardcore programing skills to patch up windows on their own.