T430 Painfully Slow - Considering Memory and HDD upgrades - Feedback Appreciated

[nTrouble]

Hi All:

I have a T430 which I use mostly for web surfing and word processing. Occasionally, I will stream video to it, and it holds copies of HD video from a camcorder.

It has a 500Gb HDD and 8 Gb of memory. The HDD is almost full and the machine is getting painfully slow. It will lock up while it processes its way through things.

The T430 is a little over three years old. I would like to cheaply squeeze another year or so out of it before I replace it.

I am considering swapping out the 8Gb memory with a Crucial 16 Gb kit for roughly $75 dollars. - Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3L 1600 MT/s (PC3L-12800) SODIMM 204-Pin Memory - CT2KIT102464BF160B

I was also thinking about dropping a WD 1Tb HDD in it for $62.99 WD - Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 9.5 MM 2.5 Inch - WD10JPVX. I do not think that I want to put a SSD in it. Seagate has a 2Tb HDD for around $90.00, but I have read some negative reliability reviews.

I have an Apricon Drive wire and I was thinking about porting over the drive using that.

Will this $200.00 breathe new life into the machine, or am I missing something.

Thanks.

[theterminator93]

Almost certainly the reason for the slowness is the fact that the hard disk is nearly full. You can get 5 or more additional years out of it and cure the slowness by putting an SSD into it. 8GB RAM is plenty for what you describe your uses as, unless you check task manager and notice your utilization consistently over 6GB.

A bigger HDD will temporarily address the extreme slowness, but it's not really going to "breathe new life" into the machine and wake it up up to its full potential like an SSD would. If I was in your situation, I'd get a 240 or 480 GB SSD to put in the main SATA bay for your OS and programs, then get an UltraBay 2.5" SATA adapter for a 1TB or bigger HDD to store your video content on.

For example, my nearly 10-year-old FrankenPad with a Core 2 Duo CPU and 8GB RAM with an SSD is faster than most new off-the-shelf computers with a spinning hard disk.

[TPFanatic]

You could try a disk defrag

[brchan]

I agree with theterminator93 on an SSD for OS/programs and an HDD for photos and videos. Once you experience a good SSD, it is very difficult to go back to an HDD. The performance improvement is so large and you get the added benefits of quietness, lower temps, high shock resistance, and less power consumption.

[UMPC2024]

Yeah, Seagate in general has had reliability issues. My friend that worked at Intel was replacing ThinkPad hard drives and most of them were Seagates. I would recommend HGST Hitachi for hard drives if you can afford it.

Dropped my T430 that's also 3 years old last year and replaced the 500 GB HDD with a 250 GB Intel SSD. Couldn't be happier as it boots up so much faster and extended battery life maybe 30 mins - 1 hour. Also have 8 GB RAM and I think it's sufficient for word processing and web browsing.

[palerider]

I've got a friend with a t420, she was complaining that it was slow and doggy... she bumped the ram from 4 to 16gig, and that helped a bit... then she replaced the low end i3 cpu with the top i7 cpu, and in the process cleaned the heatsink fins... now, besides "holy cats, this thing is fast" as a reaction, she also says it's much quieter... leading me to think that the heatsink was probably crufted up, the thing was heating up, and clocking itself down to avoid damage.

so, when was the last time you cleaned out the heatsink fins?

[bit_twiddler]

SSD + 16G ram - Windows benefits greatly from having an SSD boot drive.
You'll probably find that you won't have to junk the machine for some time if you do that.

I have a machine similar to yours, and regularly run several VMs, Chrome, project software etc
simultaneously, and it's a great performer.

[kfzhu1229]

Here is what I am planning to do/did to my T530i:
16GB RAM (ended up getting DDR3L because it was cheaper than the DDR3 in store)
MSATA SSD
i7-3840QM
FHD LCD
Fresh Windows 10 1607 x64
if those are still not enough, GO AND USE A XEON SERVER

[nTrouble]

Thanks everybody for the feedback. Here is a little more information on my system.

Intel Core i7-3250M CPU @ 2.90 GHz
8 GB RAM
Disc Drives
HGST HTS725050A7E630 57 GB free/465GB capacity
SAMSUNG MZMPA016HMCD-000 15271 capacity/15271 unallocated

As you can see, my HDD is getting full. Does it look like I have a Samsung mSATA drive that is not being used?

While I like the 1TB WD Blue HDD for less than $100, the consensus here is that a SDD would extend the life of this machine and return some speed to it. I was looking at the 1TB Crucial SDD for roughly $249. Can my current HDD be cloned to the SDD and just swapped with out me having to reinstall the OS or mess with the BIOS? I am not very technologically literate, and my family hides when I try to fix things.

Thanks again for your feedback.

[brchan]

You can clone an HDD and SSD, but often times you run into weird behavior or crashes. It is best to start from a fresh OS installation in this case.

[kfzhu1229]

You can clone an HDD and SSD, but often times you run into weird behavior or crashes. It is best to start from a fresh OS installation in this case.

Windows' system image tool is VERY stable. I have used one image I made previously and is put on my 2 T43, T42 and 2 Dell OptiPlex and NONE of them have any problems at all even after upgrading to Windows 10 afterwards. However if you use Gpart and stuff to clone you will go into bootmgr problems.

[thinkpadcollection]

Unallocated 16GB on this samsung 16GB mSATA means it is not partitioned and formatted. Not enough for windows 7, get 250GB or so mSATA EVO 850 or Sandisk mSATA. Put the windows 7 and heavily used programs on mSATA and use 1TB as data and some programs if does not fit on mSATA.

mSATA drive location is under bottom memory cover. Easy job, just one screw for cover and one litttle screw holding card in place. First memory slot is under the keyboard, and a keyboard screw unscrewed and push keyboard forward till tabs come loose from front bezel, raise and pull gently, mind the amber colored ribbon cable. Second memory slot and keyboard screw is in that bottom cover.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[palerider]

Thanks everybody for the feedback. Here is a little more information on my system.

Intel Core i7-3250M CPU @ 2.90 GHz
8 GB RAM
Disc Drives
HGST HTS725050A7E630 57 GB free/465GB capacity
SAMSUNG MZMPA016HMCD-000 15271 capacity/15271 unallocated

As you can see, my HDD is getting full. Does it look like I have a Samsung mSATA drive that is not being used?

can't you 1) delete some stuff, and 2) use the msata as cache to speed up the OS? and...
have you cleaned out your heatsink lately?

[thinkpadcollection]

Minimum requirement installation of windows 7 is 16GB, recommended is 20 but wait, there's more; Checked my T420 since this is fairly fresh install with all updates, libreoffice, firefox and VLC, downloaded drivers is 83GB in total. That is a HGST 1TB 7200rpm SATA.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[theterminator93]

I've installed Windows 7 with SP1 (x86) on an X41T with a 16GB CF card, when all was updated etc. it used a paltry 14.3 GB.

Take that with a grain of salt though, it will use more on the newer system due to more complicated drivers, x64 architecture, larger page file etc... Normally when I set up software images on machines at work Win7 64 with all programs and such comes in at around 35-40GB.

[kfzhu1229]

I've installed Windows 7 with SP1 (x86) on an X41T with a 16GB CF card, when all was updated etc. it used a paltry 14.3 GB.

Take that with a grain of salt though, it will use more on the newer system due to more complicated drivers, x64 architecture, larger page file etc... Normally when I set up software images on machines at work Win7 64 with all programs and such comes in at around 35-40GB.

X64's system requirements are typically more than twice higher than x86, for example: Windows 7 x86 vs. x64
x86: 1Ghz Processor
1GB RAM recommended (384mb is the very, very least you want)
10GB HDD is the very minimum after removing pagefile and hibernation
x64: 1Ghz x64 Processor (Pentium 4 5x1 or 6xx or Core2 for laptops minimum on the Intel side)
2GB RAM MINIMUM (It is VERY slow!!), I suggest 4GB
20GB HDD is the very minimum (Of course if you have 16GB RAM hibernation would take 16GB on that drive for Windows 7)
Windows 10:
x86: 1Ghz Processor (On the Intel side, Pentium 4 5xxJ or 6xx or Pentium M 7x0 or one of the following low-voltage processors: Pentium M 733J, 753, 773, 758, 778) (For ThinkPads, T43, R52 and X41 are the oldest that can run Windows 10, but only ATI T43 and R52 GPUs' drivers can be installed)
1GB RAM minimum (performance decreases drastically if lower than that)
16GB HDD minimum
x64: 1Ghz Processor (Core2 series or T/X/R6x are the oldest supported)
2GB RAM MINIMUM (it is VERY SLOW that it is UNUSABLE)
30GB HDD space recommended personally
common requirement: DX9 compatible GPU