R2, i5: general sluggishness

Hi everyone,

I have owned an M11x R2 (i5, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD) for a few months now and have overall been very happy with it. It runs 3D applications with ease, as well as HD video at 1080p (with an occasional hiccup).

Although, navigating through the the menus of Windows 7 is less responsive than I would expect from a high performance laptop. In addition, launching applications takes longer than I've experienced with other gaming machines, and loading up a bunch of tab in Firefox doesn't happen as fast as I would have hoped.

I've turned off all unnecessary services and disabled most start-up programs. I've tweaked Power Options and turned off some Windows features (Search indexing).


Once again, my M11x runs games very well, but boot up time is slow, and opening menus and applications take longer than I would expect from a high-ish end gaming machine. In terms of the above, it just doesn't feel like a fresh-out-of-the-box computer.

Does anyone have any ideas to help my machine run better for everything besides games?

 

Well for boot up time and opening apps you need a Solid State Drive. It will make that WAY faster. If you mean moving windows around and aero yes I think it is a little sluggish because it uses the Intel card for Aero instead of the Integrated. Very annoying. Using powermizer to turn off all the powersaving features helped aero for me, but I have another laptop with a 320M in it and when I do the window key - tab thing to flip through windows it is much smoother. Bottom line is I know of NO way to use the 335M to accelerate Aero. It would be nice if this thing could use the discrete card for everything like the R1 when the laptop is connected to power, instead of Optimus.

My windows experience index for aero on he R2 is showing 2.8, gaming 6.5

 

I noticed the slow boot up time right off the bat, so to fix it I eventually reinstalled, and this improved to boot up time quite a bit!! Though you probably don't really want to do that.

 

Have you check to see if your HDD is not fragmented. I do not know about win 7 but Vista Defrag tool will only defragment files with fragments smaller than 64 MB on NTFS file systems.

How to defrag files over 64 mb you have to right click on the Command Prompt and select "Run as administrator".

Type in this to see a analysis of your drive. defrag c: -a -v

Type in this to defrag anything smaller that 64 mb. defrag c: -v -r

Type this to defrag all files. defrag c: -v -w

Here is what all that means.
The "-a" parameter tells the defragger to perform a fragmentation analysis.

The "-v" option tells it to be verbose in its report.

The "-r" option tells the defragmentation utility to treat files that are fragmented with 64 MB fragments or larger as though they are not fragmented.

The "-w" tells the defrag tool to do a full defragmentation.

 

I also have the i5, and I agree with the boot part, takes some time (not that much, and I´m ok with it, does not bother me at all)

But the laptops works great for all non gaming stuff, I use IE, and is very fast, I have heard that FF takes a lot of memory with a few tabs, I dunno, I´m happy with IE, but like I tell you, Office, Messenger, IE, Itunes, WMP, etc. All works great, fast and efficient

 

This is very interesting. I didn't know that the Aero interface can't use the 335M. Maybe I'll turn off Areo effects, and see if I notice a speed increase.

How exactly do you use powermizer? Is it the same thing as the Nvidia control panel app?

 

Aero using the Intel HD Graphics GPU has nothing to do with system sluggishness. GPU only has an impact on screen re-draw, which is not the issue here. If the problem is that Firefox takes 5 seconds to launch, then it will take 5 seconds to launch regardless of whether you are using the Intel HD Graphics GPU or the nVidia 335M GPU.

The absolute best thing you can do for your system responsiveness is to get rid of unneeded startup items. But it sounds like you already did that.

Next, I would consider getting an SSD. They are literally 100x faster than hard drives in the areas that matter (random read speeds, and IOPS). Getting an SSD is like going from a 56K dial-up modem to a 5Mbps broadband connection.

Beyond that, a clean format of Windows will help immensely. Defragging may help a bit, but won't give you the monumental increases in performance that you are looking for. If you want that level of perofrmance improvement, you really need to ditch the 5400rpm hard drive and get an SSD.

 

I'm gonna throw out an obvious question here, but do you think you might have virus on your machine, or is your virus software acting up? Something that hits constantly is a sign of commonly driver issues, virus/malware, etc. No modern system should take a long time to open everything. An SSD is a nice solution, but before you go that route I would see what is wrong with the system first. If you have a 7200 RPM drive, no software issues, things should be pretty snappy outside of boot...

 

I have the 250GB 7200 RPM drive. I'm running MS Security Essentials with default settings.

Another note: The system fan turns on at a high speed at the slightest level of activity -- say, opening a few tabs in Firefox or watching a 360p YouTube video. I don't know if it's normal for the fan to be on (at a high speed) so often.

 

Flash's fault, lol. It needs an insane amount of CPU and GPU time (even for videos...) for what amounts to a few moving sprites and a video loader

 

It does effect the "smoothness" of aero, which is what I thought he ment. For example you can open a web browser and then several other windows on top of it and when you drag one of the windows around I can notice the move effect is much more choppy then on an computer using a dedicated gpu to accelerate aero. This is even more pronounced if you output the desktop at 1080p using a monitor.