X40 Upgrade Question

[Kamika007z]

Hey all,

I have a client who has an X40 notebook and her computer takes forever to logon/logoff or even shut down.

It has about 512MB of memory in it, can you upgrade it to anything higher like 1GB? Would this even help?

I looked over her machine and it has all relevant software updates exept for R&R 3.1 as it was causing some networking problems. (This was a known issue which I found on another thread in this forum)

Any suggestions for the memory upgrade though?

Thank you!

[bigtiger]

While you can certainly upgrade the memory to 1.5g, I am not sure if that will help. You may need to check if there is any software problem before you upgrade the memory. Virus? Conflict of drivers? etc..

[faberryman]

I added 512MB to my X41 Tablet PC. I'm not sure it boots any faster, but it sure seems to be much more responsive!

[Kamika007z]

The client of ours is somewhat upset at the dismal shutdown time it takes in order for the machine to shut off.

Bootup may not be as bad, but it takes about a couple minutes for the system to shut down entirely.

Kinda of irritating.

Also, she has no form of viruses nor spyware of any sort.

Any others?

Thanks

[K0LO]

Sometimes you can fix slow shutdown problems by installing Microsoft's User Profile Hive Cleanup Service (UPHC) from here.

The slow startup problem is usually due to having too many programs and/or services attempting to start when the PC starts up. IBM is notorious for adding everything but the kitchen sink into their preload image, so you might start by eliminating things that your client isn't using, paying particular attention to the Startup folder and the HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run branch of the registry. Keeping the disk defragmented will also help decrease the startup time.

Another area to look at is anything to do with networking. Are there any programs that check for updates upon startup? Norton Antivirus, Sun Java, Adobe, and others sometimes check for updates upon startup. Some programs let you disable the automatic check, or you can remove their startup processes from the registry. Are there any mapped persistent network drives? Any that point to networks that aren't available will cause a delay until Windows gives up trying to connect to nonexistent network shares.

Sometimes it's a lot less time-consuming to just re-image the machine instead of hunting down each of these issues individually. On my X41 I reduced the startup time from 5 minutes to 60 seconds and the shutdown time from a couple of minutes to 30 seconds by doing a clean install of Windows and using only the IBM utilities that were useful to me.

[losmeme]

I totally agree with KOL0, the easiest thing to do is a fresh re-install of Windows.

I have an X31 that exhibited the same problems, this is a fairly well known condition with XP, and builds up over time with usage. I have it happen on my desktops as well. The X31 was taking up to 3 minutes to fully log out and shut down.

When it does occur, I know that the time for a fresh install has come, as I don't have the patience anymore to try and fix Windows when it gets all clogged up.

This has been an apparent result of using Windows to me for some time, and is the EXACT reason I have no plans to update to Vista anytime soon. Microsoft is in denial that it's OS is buggy, and needs to be reinstalled on a regular basis to maintain optimum performance.[/i]

[K0LO]

losmeme:

I agree that the expedient solution is sometimes a clean install, but have to take issue with the common belief that Windows degrades over time. There's always a reason -- usually some badly written driver or a particular program that causes the problem. I have two desktop machines (home and at work) that have the same installation of Windows XP for several years now and they're both as snappy as the day that Windows was installed.

The issue here is how much time is it going to take to track down the offending program or driver versus how much time is it going to take to just start over.

[Kamika007z]

Hey K0lo and Losmeme,

I agree with both of you, unfortunately this is a client's computer and she has everything running the way she likes it, therefore, I'm trying to avoid imaging and reformatting it.

If it were my system, I would've been doing it already.

Also, yes, I agree with you k0lo about everything but the kitchen sink. I usually have the hive cleanup service installed on my machine, but didn't think to install it on that machine. She also has a cached logon account from her work domain she uses as her primary account to log as her desktop with persistent mapped drves too.

I did go through her run in regedit under HKLM, and removed anything that may be of a nuisance to the system's performance; defrag was ran as well... diskeeper to be exact.

I guess more crud should be removed. But do you think adding an extra 1GB of memory would help things?

Let me know, I apprecate both your insights.

Thank you!

[K0LO]

I agree that 512 MB is insufficient memory for WinXP and you will definitely improve performance with more memory. I would add an extra 512 MB to bring the total up to 1 GB. You won't see much improvement if you go above 1 GB unless your client runs Photoshop or other memory-hungry apps. But extra RAM consumes power so there is a tradeoff between performance and battery life, so I'd recommend against adding an extra 1 GB. However, I don't think that you will affect startup and shutdown time by adding more RAM unless you're talking about the time needed to hibernate which gets worse when you add more RAM.

I'd be really suspicious about the persistent mapped drives; that's probably the reason for the slow startup and shutdown. You might want to experiment with those to confirm. I stopped using persistent shares many years ago because every time that there is a network hiccup your machine slows down at every File/Open or File/Save dialog box while Windows builds a list of locations on all drives. Instead of a persistent drive mapping I use the "My Network Places" feature because the mappings created there are only searched if you deliberately click on a folder to access something on the network. But that requires a change of habits that your client may not be willing to do.

My daughter brought her laptop home recently with the complaint that there was a 20 second delay on every right-click operation before the menu appeared. I traced this to a persistent drive mapping to an Andrew File System share on her school's network. We removed the persistent share and end of problem. Every time that I troubleshoot a PC that has long delays I always suspect first something to do with networking and I'm usually correct. Long delay = network timeout (usually).

[tomh009]

I'd be really suspicious about the persistent mapped drives; that's probably the reason for the slow startup and shutdown. You might want to experiment with those to confirm. I stopped using persistent shares many years ago because every time that there is a network hiccup your machine slows down at every File/Open or File/Save dialog box while Windows builds a list of locations on all drives. Instead of a persistent drive mapping I use the "My Network Places" feature because the mappings created there are only searched if you deliberately click on a folder to access something on the network. But that requires a change of habits that your client may not be willing to do.

I fully agree on this one -- mapped drives are the most likely cause. And very easy to test: delete all mapped drives, using either Windows Explorer or the command prompt, and test the startup/shutdown times.

[seneca]

I have the same symtoms with my machine. Slow startups (I actually get to the Welcome screen but stays there for minutes) and slow shutdowns (a bit faster than startups though).

And I've come to the conclusion that SFU (Services for Unix) is to blame, it takes a loooong time to map up those NFS network drives.

In this case, more memory wouldn't help.

Don't think it's so bad when it's windows shares but you never know.

And btw, I'd recommend your client to suspend instead of shutting down unless she absolutely have to.

[Kamika007z]

Thank you all for your help on the matter.