Pentium-M - a bit tardy?

I recently had the opportunity to try 2 Pentium-M laptops.

The first was an advent, Pentium-M 1.73GHz running windows XP with at least 512mb ram. At the time the machine was less than 2 weeks old yet i found it to be remarkably slow when loading... well anything really! It would also bog down sometimes and take an incredibly long time to do anything at all, something I've noticed on my slot-7 p3 media centre.

I also tried a sony vaio over the weekend (with a horrible glossy screen, ugh!) with the same 1.73GHz P-M chip and 512mb of ram. Again, this laptop was quite new, I didn't ask but by the condition and design I would guess under a year. I found this one incredibly slow, taking about 4 times or more the time my humble Celeron-M takes to do the same tasks.

Does anyone else have any experience of this and know why this might happen? Could it be that the hard drive is older and slower or with an IDE instead of SATA interface, the install of windows old, speedstep taking it's time, too many applications running in the background, or simply a badly made laptop?

Cheers

p.s. I'm not implying anything bad about P-Ms, just wondering why these two are running so slowly!

 

My guess would be poor management of the machine. It could be mucked up with adware/spyware, virii, and just generally unclean. Too many background tasks, most of which are unneeded (Quicktime, RealPlayer, WildTangent, Adobe, messenger, etc). These will all cause some issues, along with the possibility of a glut of internet history, cookies, temp files, and so on. I have a mobile Barton in a SFF desktop that runs circles around alot of peoples' newer machines simply because I keep it maximized.

 

I'd accept that for the Vaio for sure but the advent at the time was very new, any ideas there?

I also tried a Core Duo laptop, again advent, bought at the same time and that was hardly the powerhouse i was expecting. I must admit I haven't seen a lot of support on here for Advent, is there a reason for that?

I am with you on maximisation, I had to get good at it when I was running my old laptop - a P3 933 running XP pro!

 

Could be that these laptops have slow 4200 RPM Hard drives. That would slow down loading up programs and the like.

 

True but unlikely, i thought 5400rpm was the norm these days, especially on something pricey like a vaio. The 4200rpm drive on my old portege was horrific though.

 

I'd say poorly maintained, even a new laptop ships with lots of background apps that are supposed to 'improve' the end users experience, when all they do is load up stuff into memory on startup which uses up pagefile and provide nothing that Windows doesn't have its own utility for. The amount of stuff I removed off the two Acer laptops I had improved loading times no end, that and doing my own optimizations to the startup programs as well.

I have a Pentium M here, and I don't find it any slower for tasks than my old desktop. The hard drive slows things down a bit, but nothing that a few seconds of waiting doesn't cure.

 

Is yours 4200 or 5400? I've noticed a very significant advantage from my new SATA-150 5400rpm drive over my old 4200rpm IDE.

It's also possible that background tasks do it, first thing I did when i booted up the new machine was to remove all the silly little apps Toshiba had installed and disable the ones i couldn't remove and get msconfig on their asses!

I am wondering, does having a widescreen display (and thus a higher resolution) with an igp like intel GMA900 put more strain on the system? I noticed on my old portege that as the IGP was simply laughable (trident cyberblade 16mb shared) the cpu would really heat up and the whole thing would bog down for graphically intensive tasks (in that laptop's case an animated msn window). I'm wondering if the same applies to newer systems with integrated graphics and therefore the installed ram, allocated ram and the power of the igp make a difference, by transferring more load to the cpu?

In retrospect I wonder if this laptop seems to be so fast because of the 256mb x200m, the cream of mainstream igps?

 

I've got a 4200rpm drive here, feels pretty quick though. Not that I wouldn't mind a 5400 or 7200rpm !

I can't see the resolution affecting system speed in 2d mode. I notice no difference between my Pentium M/X1300 based laptop and my Celly M/GMA 900 laptop in 2d tasks. Perhaps at insane high resolutions integrated might suffer, but modern system have so much memory available to them 2d work is a doddle. Though that all may change with Aero Glass.

 

Ooh another Celeron-M user, why's in not in your sig or are you ashamed?

What's Aero Glass?

 

Aero Glass is an effect that will be used in some versions of Windows Vista
It's like Windows XP compared to Win2k, very fancy and nice looking but will probably take a lot of resources

 

If the laptops are new its probably because of the bloatware. The Toshiba I own below... 75 starting processes to boot including AOL install, Norton 2004 install, ConfigFree, SpeechEngine, another network utility, etc. Extremely sssllloooowww. Since then I've cut it down to 29 starting processes, w/ a power management utility, spyware, antivirus, and firewall to start up. My laptop is now about as fast as a Turion X2 based machine, and its 2 years behind w/ relatively sluggish specs. Bloatware makes a huge difference.

 

Could be bloatware. Could also be speedstep. Pentium M's and Core Duo's can clock themselves up and down depending on the situation. The computers you were on could have been locked in low power mode and stuck at about 800mhz speed. My 1.86ghz PM out performs my friends 3.2ghz P4 desktop.

 

I would count on speedstep as Vampire said. And Pentium M is still a decent processor.

 

I know what you mean by slow! My roomate has a Fujitsu 13" with 1.7GHz Pentium M and 512mb ram, 60GB 5400RPM. It's slow because of the low RAM, The integrated graphics card( I'm almost positive both laptops you've tried use integrated gfx card with shared memory) uses 8-128mb from system memory which makes things even worse. It's not the processor or the hard drive. Throw in a couple of Giga's ram in there and the thing will fly.
I did a clean windows install, and removed almost everything from startup programes, ran ad-aware, virus scan, defragment the thing, but it's still slow for me.
My friend has a Toshiba with 2.0GHz Pentium M, 1GB, 120GB 5400RPM, integrated gfx, and it's MUCH faster than this Fujitsu, it's the low memory.

 

I think Integrated graphics make a much more marked difference to xp when the system has 512mb system ram. My machine came with 512mb system ram, of which 64mb was automatically allocated to graphics. Now I have 1GB of which 128mb is allocated to gfx and this thing absolutely flies. I don't think 448mb of system ram is really enough for xp, now I have 896 which is much much better!

I think that coupled with bloatware could be responsible for this tardiness. I will say however that my old portege was a much more responsive machine with a 5400rpm drive in it, the old 4200 really bogged it down and loading times were very slow.

I'll investigate Laura's speedstep settings when I'm next over.

A question on Vista: My new machine has a Windows XP - Windows Vista Compatible sticker on it. Do all new laptops have that or only the ones they think will be up to the task?

 

I would hazard a guess most new laptops now ship with that sticker. Widows Vista Premium ready would be another matter though. Basic Vista requirements are

Processor 800 MHz
Memory 512 MB RAM
Graphics Card DirectX 9 capable
Graphics Memory 32 MB RAM
HDD capacity 20 GB
HDD free space 15 GB
HDD type Normal
Other drives DVD-ROM

 

Hmm, sounds optemistic. That's pretty similar to the spec of my old Portege which was fine with XP but not with much else, especially anything remotely graphically intensive!

 

I would agree with that, right on.

5,400RPM may be the norm now because just about every new notebook uses SATA, but remember that when the Pentium M was out, it was mostly Ultra ATA/100. My Sager NP5320 was one of the only Centrino Pentium-M based laptops to have a SATA drive interface. The base hard drives (and in a lot of cases even the upgrade options) in older Centrino notebooks were 4,200RPM units and not 5,400.

How fast a computer does something is relative. I have used high-end processors from the AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 to the Core 2 Duo T7600, and when compared to my Pentium M, there is very little difference in general tasks. Start doing some heavy, CPU intensive multitasking, and then there's a difference, sure, but that's not something I do every day. As long as there are leftover clock cycles on my Pentium I can multitask without problems.

Between your Celeron M 380 and a Pentium M 740, there is probably not going to be any difference in regular tasks; both are equally capable. When it comes to benchmarks the Pentium will obviously do better (larger cache, faster clockspeed, higher FSB), as well being superior on battery (the Pentium M features SpeedStep whereas the Celeron M does not), but generally, the difference is not that great. It's not often in my experience that the CPU is the bottleneck in a system.

That sticker is misleading; it means your system can run Windows Vista Home Basic, which lacks the Aero Glass GUI (Graphical User Interface). Microsoft is telling all the manufacturers to slap that thing on.
Your laptop should be able to handle Windows Vista and Aero Glass fine though Jess, considering you have an X200M (far better than a GMA900/GMA950) and 1GB of RAM.

 

Thanks Chaz!

If I upgrade to vista i.e. if anyone can give me a good enough reason, I wiill probably upgrade to 2GB of ram just to be sure.

 

Nothing makes a fast computer slow faster then Norton

 

Hahaha - most true.

 

Proud to have never had it installed!

 

Core 2 doesn't quickly fall to Norton though (at least not yet)!
Just a few more seconds of startup time...and then nothing bothers it my notebook.

 

What was really sad was when PC Magazine (I think it was them) suggested that the #1 reason for consumer dual-core was to have a WHOLE CORE to run AV/Firewall/Anti-Spyware...

Norton slows down your PC regardless of how many cores it has, though. I felt it on my X2. It's the stupid resident scanning - loading one program = thousands of files accessed these days, and it scans every one...

 

Norton actually has all features of a virus or adware. Once I spent one afternoon removing it from my friend's comp. After uninstall taht wasn't working I ended up using all my knowledge for removing viruses and spyware (without any programs, just registry and tricks with not loading shell, deleting dlls etc...) to remove it . Finally I did it. Tricky bastard.

And that dual-core remark about one core for TSR AV and Antispyware programs is just silly. But I guess it will eventually happen that way. For now my pentium M is very fast doing no AV or antispyware scans (well except microsoft defender ) No viruses either, that is the most important.

Ivan

 

HA HA HA so true! Hooray for AVG!!