New T500, less than thrilled with performance.

[dysnomian]

Got a new t500, 2.4ghz dual core, 4gb ram, 160 gig 7200rpm HD, vista x64.

I have basically nothing installed on this computer as of now, aside from symantec endpoint protection and office.

I disabled as much superfluous vista crap as possible. I'm in the "windows classic" mode, turned off as much as I could at startup. Still, it seems like this machine takes FOREVER to start up. It took ten minutes for that battery %tage indicator and even opening simple programs seem to take longer than it should.

Anyone else experience this/have any ideas?

[ZaZ]

How about disabling any ThinkVantage Tools you're not using?

[Marin85]

The usual answer to such experience is clean install of Vista. Believe it or not, it does miracles Guides for performing a clean install without having to buy another Vista license can be found in our Vista subforum. Your other option is simply to uninstall some of the ThinkVantage utilities that come preinstalled on your Thinkpad as FredGarvin has already pointed out. Rescue&Recovery and Client Security Solution are in my experience the significant ones that give that feeling of noticeable performance reduction. However, the boot time is far not the best measure for system performance, in fact it tells few to nothing about the real system performance. It´s another question that many users don´t like long boot times, but then again this very much depends on one´s preferences (boot time vs. what I need to start up with windows). Saying this, with your specs Vista would actually fly.

Cheers,

Marin

[Performa636CD]

Is there a list of all ThinkVantage tools and what they do?

Disaster recovery stuff is something I could do away with, but I'd hate to deactivate something like airbag protection.

[dysnomian]

A list of what the thinkpad processes do would be nice. Like the guy said above, I wouldn't want to lose the drop protection on the HD.

I know that bootup time isn't the defining factor of performance, still its extremely irritating when I have an older computer with only 1gig of ram and years of crap installed on it booting up in half the time of my new thinkpad.