M15x - New to me - slow as dirt

Hey everyone!
I just picked up a M15x and its super slow. The guy just restored it to factory via the dvd and it seemed ok before i purchased it but upon getting it home the menus are so slow. I updated the drivers even tried windows 10 but its a sloppy mess. I tried to install a basic game from Steam and it ran so slow and poorly. Now i have 15+ years troubleshooting computers but for the life of me, cant put my finger on what is causing this slow down. I know its a popular laptop and people claim to play some amazing games on it but I cant see this happening on this guy. I can see it running poorly in latest games but just windows and browsing is lacking performance.

The SSD is old, 8+ years?
Video is the 470m
CPU is the 1.86Ghz version
8GB DDR3

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Prinler

 

If the battery is any good, unplug the power adapter and see if it runs better. When i got my M17X it was slow as hell because the power adapter wasn't giving it enough power.

 

Which power adapter do you have?

 

Mine came with a Dell 65watt adapter... which gave the laptop enough power to "run". The original adapter died some years ago. The 65watt didnt even have the power to charge the battery.

 

lol 65w is nowhere near enough to run that system, CPU alone will eat 35W

 

The battery being removed worked! Its a ton better then it was! I can even now put the battery back in, left it overnight plugged in and its working. I currently have what i think is a 150W adapter. Delta Electronics PA-5m10 family DA150PM100-00
I just ordered the 240W adapter online just because i plan to upgrade a bit.

Next i need to find a list of compatible video cards that will fit in this guy. See whats most cost effective and I dont have to do crazy support.

 

GPU that are compatible? Try:

AMD in order weakest/cheapest to strongest (top end cards for each generation listed only - lower end cards work too)

5850/70 1GB GDDR5
6970M
6990M (avoid - hot card)
M6000
M6100 (great buy essentially better than M290X or 680M when heavily OCed)
7970M
8970M
M290X
M390X (not tested yet but is compatible - comparable to 970M but cheaper and hotter)

Nvidia

260M
280M
460M
470M
480M
485M
675M
770M
680M
870M
780M
880M (avoid - hot card)
970M
M4000M (rare and usually expensive)
980M (avoid - hot card for most part)

Also get yourself a 920XM or 940XM whichever is cheaper, install throttlestop, overclock all cores to 3ghz+ under decent thermal paste and thank me later. If you intend to upgrade GPU to top half of either list above getting am XM cpu is a must if you don't want to severely bottleneck your gpu.

 

mispost

 

This is such a valuable post! Thank you for posting it! Unfortunately I have already purchased a few items so i didn't give it the best search as i could have apparently.

I just finished installed a 920XM with an HD 8950. I paid about $100 for both!
Also a 240W PSU with the 90 deg adapter but dont understand the "pin" mod i keep reading about.

You mention overclocking and throttle stop.
I dont see anything in the bios to overclock 008 bios.
I also ran throttle stop and dont see any changes.
Please advise

steve

Before and After - Userbenchmark scores

UserBenchmarks: Game 15%, Desk 36%, Work 23%
CPU: Intel Core i7 Q 840 - 39.5%
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M - 7.6% - 11FPS
SSD: Samsung PM800 Series 2.5" 256GB - 20.5%
RAM: Hynix HMT351S6BFR8C-H9 2x4GB - 40.2%
MBD: Alienware M15x
UserBenchmarks: Game 23%, Desk 39%, Work 25%
CPU: Intel Core i7 X 920 - 44.1%
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 8950 - 23.6% -70FPS
SSD: Samsung PM800 Series 2.5" 256GB - 19.9%
RAM: Hynix HMT351S6BFR8C-H9 2x4GB - 43.3%
MBD: Alienware M15x

 

Throttlestop will take a little learning - but there is lots of info on the Throttlestop board, and lots of people who will help you. Throttlestop is particularly useful for enabling this machine to do all it can. Have fun! Joe

 

Can you show me the way? I am struggling to learn anything about throttle stop... seems like anything i do makes no changes at all. No real easy guides.
How are people overclocking the M15x inside windows im assuming? What program are you using to get 3ghz out of it? I just reopened and put down some nice thermal paste thermal pads. Im ready to go, just need the know how.

 

On Throttlestop, the "TRL" button can be used to set the multipliers, be careful though because it may crash at very high multipliers such as 28 or 29. I have mine running at 27 27 28 28 and it crashes very rarely.

 

I just installed a new SSD v-nand samsung. Reinstalled windows and now my benchmark for video is lower. Its chunky and lost 20fps on the tests. I have reinstalled the driver and same issue. The benchmark stutters now on the video portion.
What can i try?