SOLUTION FOUND FOR SLOW SSD SPEEDS!
NOTE: THIS WORKS ON THE ENVY 15 AND SEVERAL OTHER PM55 AND HM55 CHIPSET NOTBOOKS AND HAS BEEN CONFIRMED ON INTEL, SAMSUNG AND VORTEX DRIVES. SHOULD WORK FINE ON THE ENVY 14 AFAIK. I AM COPYING THE FOLLOWING FROM MY ENVY 15 OWNERS LOUNGE POST....
This is a solution to fix the slow 4K R/W speeds of the intel and other SSD's in the Envy series. It actually appears to affect all CPU's using the PM55 or HM55 chipset. The negative impact of this 'fix' is that it will cuase your CPU to idle at full speed under no load in order to override the 'C1E' power savings state which is the culprit that bottlenecks the SSD speeds.
Here are my 'normal speeds' vs. improved speeds with this tweak:
View attachment 55236 original speeds
View attachment 55237 speeds after disabling idle state
The good news is you can easily set single (or more) power plan settings to use when you want (or need) maximum SSD performance and switch back to normal by changing power plans. Bad news is while in this mode your temps will be high even at idle. My 540M idles at 65C when in this mode but still just gets lukewarm to the touch after an hour, those of you with i7's may have much higher temps.
CAUTION! This is a registry edit tweak and should be done with extreme care after backing up your registry so you can reverse it if you make an error etc. Not responsible for errors on your part.... (Just covering my a**).
1. Go to "regedit"
2 .Locate: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Power \ PowerSettings \ 54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00 \ 5d76a2ca-e8c0-402f-a133-2158492d58ad
3. Change Attributes from 1 to 0.
4. Then go to any Advanced Power Plan settings, select Processor Power Management, There will be a new option 'processor idle disable'. This will show in all 6 default power plan settings (3 for plugged in and 3 for on battery)
5. Change this to 'disable idle' on the plans you want to have full SSD performance
NOTE: Doing this will cause the CPU to idle at full speed at 0% load. It also works on the battery settings but will kill your battery life, my 540M idles at ~19W in this state vs. 5.5W in normal mode....
Some people are attempting to see if this can be adjusted to just disable idle on 1 core or ideally on just 1 thread which would reduce heat and power draw significantly, probably be a full time fix while plugged in. Will update here if any improvements are found.
PS: I really do see a big improvement, for example, in my Nikon photo viewing app. I can now scroll through a 500+ 20MB image folder at full screen full resolution without any pauses or skipping (grey out) of any images. Never been able to do this before, the whole folder takes like 65 seconds to scroll through.....
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
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