Thinkpads Forum

My 4th X series. I think this will be a good machine.

1. Slow boot. I SUSPECT that this will be due to Thinkvantage services. HOWEVER, I am loth to disable or remove services: I did this on my X61s and bricked it. Had to do a reinstall.

So...APS is installed and running. Seems pointless given that the machine is SSD.

What about the TPM service? What do I lose by disabling that? I HAVE searched, but can't tell what I'll break by killing it.

And, the Maintenance Manager has apparently been renamed. Can't figure out what it is.

Can I just disable some of the services? If so, which? Again, much renaming since my X61s: Don't want to brick this box as well, especially since I now have some eight hours invested in installing and configuring my essential apps.

2. Network access is slow. This box runs about 40 Mbps. My other machines are in the 80-90 range. The card is an Intel 82567LM. Are there settings on same to be optimized?

Yes, I HAVE searched.

Thanks in advance to all who respond.

Before you do ANYTHING else, get some form of reliable backup. I use Acronis TrueImage but there are others. You can make an image of your entire hard drive and easily get back to exactly where you were when you created the image. That is the ONLY way I would experiment if I thought there was a real risk of breaking something. It totally removes the fear factor.

I keep a couple images of each of my machines on a separate 1TB hard drive that is normally unplugged. When/if anything goes wrong, I can be back up and running in about 20 minutes (takes a little less than 60 seconds per GB). It came in handy the other day when a Windows Update on my XP installation went wrong. I made it worse by trying to fix it and eventually restored from the saved image and was back where I started.

My X61s came with a clean install of Vista and no Thinkpad stuff and runs great. My used X41 came with the factory preload and was pretty slow. All I did was uninstall the stuff I didn't want like Access Connections and the backup/restore application.... and I think there was a virus scanner of some sort that insisted on doing a scan every time I booted that REALLY slowed things down. They were all clearly identified in Add/Remove programs and after uninstalling them, the machine perked up real nicely. Uninstalling them will not do any harm to your machine aside from disabling functions you might want later. But they can all be downloaded and re-installed if desired.

Paul

I have been slow to install Acronis as it tends to crap up my other machines with a bunch of startup processes and services.

I did a disk backup, but not an image.

In general, I'm quite ready to uninstall programs I can get copies of to reinstall later. However, I was reluctant with this machine due to so thoroughly bricking my X61s. Never figured out why that happened.

So far, I have removed AC and the security program, and it boots rather faster.

Thanks.

In the old days when RAM was expensive and we didn't have much, the services Acronis added might have been a tiny issue. But not these days. And they don't actually DO much of anything until you run Acronis.

Note also that you don't actually have to INSTALL Acronis to use it. You can boot from the CD (or install it, burn a CD and then uninstall it) and do just about everything except mount the backup image as a drive from the CD.

I have also used Task Manager to see what processes are occupying my processor. Often you can figure out what they are and if they are part of an installed program.

Paul

All of my machines load Task Manager at startup. I just get annoyed when I have over 50 services running. Hard to look at the list and see what is transiently burning CPU cycles.

Your comments re: Acronis noted. Might do that tonight.

Check your storage controller... make sure its not on PIO mode. Can SSD even fall back to that mode? But it would explain why your machine is behaving the way it is.