Thinkpads Forum

It's been a few weeks since I first got my T520, and it's been a great system overall.

I've been quite happy with it, but my only complaint is that it's quite slow when coming out of its suspend state.

It'll take roughly 30 seconds before it gets back to the Windows desktop, and take another 45 before it's anywhere near useable. The drive light is almost completely lit solid at this point. (My Latitude E6410, with the same exact hard drive installed, would boot up much faster from a suspend state.)

The original 500GB 7200 RPM drive that came with the laptop was throwing "sector reallocation" errors in SMART, so I replaced it with the 1TB 5400 RPM drive from said Latitude. I was anticipating a hit in performance, but not this badly.

Is this "normal" for the T420/520 series booting from a 5400 RPM hard drive, or are there underlying issues?

Do you have hybrid sleep turned on?
If so, turn it off and try to see how quickly it comes back from a suspend
(not hibernate.)

bit_twiddler wrote:Do you have hybrid sleep turned on?
If so, turn it off and try to see how quickly it comes back from a suspend
(not hibernate.)

I was actually referring to "hibernation" when I said "suspend". It's a bad habit of mine, but I keep using the terms interchangeably...

Anyway, I tried what you suggested, and it seemed to help somewhat. Not in the way you'd expect, though.

This was the first time I opened Power Manager since I rebuilt my laptop, and I noticed that many of the drop down menus were gone in the "Power Plan" tab. Gone as in I could see the category drop down menus, but the actual drop down options inside each category were missing. Once I clicked on one of the presets, everything went back to the way it should, and the whole laptop seemed to become a lot more responsive. Coming out of suspend takes no more than three seconds now (Versus the 6-8 seconds from before.)

My conclusion is that Power Manager was hosed up somehow, and that was causing many of the other issues I was having all along.

Now back to the hibernation issue...

The times you have posted are not really out of the norm for resuming from hibernation.
How many drives do you have in your T520, and your Dell, as well? And, what applications
do you have open when you hibernate the machine?

A web browser such as Chrome can easily take up 1GB of ram. If you close an
application like that, you can significantly reduce the amount of data that has to
be paged back in when you resume.

How much memory does Task Manager show in use when you hibernate?

I'm not a Windows expert, but I know from experience that on Linux that how you set up
your swap partitions and swap files can greatly affect responsiveness of your system.
If you have more than one drive, you have more options as to how to lay things out
to avoid having the head move due to spindle convention.

bit_twiddler wrote:The times you have posted are not really out of the norm for resuming from hibernation.
How many drives do you have in your T520, and your Dell, as well? And, what applications
do you have open when you hibernate the machine?

A web browser such as Chrome can easily take up 1GB of ram. If you close an
application like that, you can significantly reduce the amount of data that has to
be paged back in when you resume.

How much memory does Task Manager show in use when you hibernate?

It's a pretty basic setup. A single hard drive with two partitions. The traditional Windows 7 "System Reserved" partition, and my "C" drive partition. It was the exact same setup on my Dell.

Those times I was mentioning was when none of my usual apps were running in the background. I've had Firefox and Thunderbird running in the background before, and that takes considerably longer coming out of hibernation. (Makes sense.)

I guess the main difference here between the Dell and my ThinkPad are the background utilities and services that run on it. From my experience, the utilities that Lenovo made are quite resource heavy, especially in comparison to the Dell equivalents. That might account for something, I would think.

I'm afraid a W7 expert will have to chime in, then. My W7 system is quite sluggish compared
to my Linux installations, so that shows how little I know about it.

You have a lot of options with the T520, if it is like my T420, as far as adding an extra drive.
It actually takes 3 drives. I removed the DVD reader and put in a hard drive caddy
in the ultrabay, and when I run Kubuntu, I use a small SSD to boot from. You might try doing
something like that, I've heard that booting W7 off an SSD speeds it up considerably.

Certainly, using one hard drive is apt to produce performance problems with any OS; depending
on how things are laid out on the disk, the head may spend more time moving between tracks
than it does actually accessing data.

I'm starting to consider installing a mSATA SSD to boot from, but wanted to be sure there wasn't a simple fix to my "problem".

Would I be correct to assume that Lenovo's drivers and utilities are quite bloated?

Again, I'm not a W7 expert, but I enjoy using it, both on bare metal and in VMs.

I tend to be selective about installing stuff. I've never had a problem with Lenovo's power manager
or update manager, but I don't install what I don't need.

You might have something else going on, such as malware, or something that you accidentally
downloaded that is as dumb as a rock going out on the net to check for updates.

There's a whole industry of people who will optimize your Windows PC by getting rid of
stuff like that. It can be a real minefield.

Even on Linux, I have to fine-tune my installations to get rid of stuff that some over-eager engineer
has put on there.

Or, you could just do a fresh install, and back up the machine periodically with Acronis or
Redobackup so that when some junk does wind up on it, you can revert to a known state.

bit_twiddler wrote:Again, I'm not a W7 expert...

I know, I'm just waiting for someone else to chime in.

I've worked on, and rebuilt, many PCs over the years, but the post-IBM ThinkPads are an almost completely different animal to what I'm used to working with. (The IBM-made ones are a different story. I can rebuild a T43 in my sleep.)

It's a fresh-reinstall, but I ended up running the "Update Manager" to install all the drivers instead of doing it manually. (I prefer doing it manually, but Lenovo's support site is TERRIBLE.)