New X220T slow...

Hi,
I've just converted from a Dell Latitude E6400 to a Thinkpad X220T, and I love the IPS display! However there is a thing that annoys me a lot, which is the boot time, my X220T is pretty top spec with a i7 2620, 8GB ram, and the 320GB HDD, yes I know, it isn't a SSD, but I would've hoped it had lasted me until I got the money for a mSata drive, however with this slow boot time it is driving me crazy! Okay to the point, when I got the laptop I immediately re-installed a fresh copy of win7 ultimate 64bit, however I left the recovery partition, I started installing all the necessary Thinkvantage programs, via Thinkpad System Update, I also enrolled my thump via the Thinkvantage fingerprint software, and turned off the system, I then turned it on via the fingerprint reader, however there is a pretty big delay when it stops at the "Please wait..." screen, before i logs in, around 5-10 seconds, also when I'm at the desktop, just starting firefox takes around 5-10 seconds as well, with a i7 I would never have believed to see it take that long I also uninstalled the Rapidboot thing, which was suggested to do in another thread... What else could be wrong?


Regards
Jacob

 

By the way, what kind of CPU has almost no influence on boot up times, that is purely on the disk. Have you tried running PC Doctor on your machine to make sure your hard drive is not failing?

 

CPU speed is generally not a bottleneck at boot time unless your storage system is very fast. If you're concerned about the boot speed you should have saved the money on the i7 and bought the mSATA instead.

 

Wow! Thanks for your fast answers! I will check with PC-doctor, right now I'm running a defrag, as it said that my C: partition was 12% fragmented :S pretty weird, when I just installed Win7 a couple of days ago, also, yes I know I've could have gotten a mSata instead of the i7, however I got the laptop cheap through my workplace...

 

If you installed Windows 7 not too long ago then it may also be installing some security updates in the background which also delays the bootup time slightly but this is normal for any PC with a fresh installation.

 

Thanks for the support until now, I accidentally screwed the registry somehow, and I'm to lazy to fix the problem, so I'm going to re-install windows 7 again, however this time I will delete the recovery partition, and make one big partition for windows 7... Also, I've actually had this question in mind for some time now, but how important is Power Manager? Do I really need it? I know it is designed specifically for the Lenovo batteries, however I love a clean desktop, and having that big battery in my taskbar is annoying...

 

Don't forget to install Lenovo's RapidBoot software. This, and several restarts, should help to optimise the boot process.

As for Power Manager, I find it useful and I suspect that you won't achieve the maximum battery run time without it. if the icon annoys you then you can auto-hide the task bar (although I've just put my task bar on the left side of the screen to help use up some of the excessive width).

john

 

I installed RapidBoot before, however I did not see any difference in boot time, also, yes auto-hiding the task bar is a possibility, however it is annoying when you want to go to Start with the pen, because of the edge recognition on the X220T...

 

Okay quick question, I'm reading that UEFI should be set to UEFI only when installing Win7 64bit, however I can't boot with that option, this is a known X220 problem, however is it really that important?

 

Are you trying install an UEFI version of Windows 7? If I recall you can only try to install an UEFI version via the Windows CD rather than the Bootable USB drive if that is what you're trying. But the differences between the UEFI and Legacy BIOS installations are rather small though so it shouldn't matter too much if you ended up with one or the other.

 

I ended up installing with the default legacy option... I'm in the middle of using Thinkvantage System Update, to update my system, I'm hoping it is installing the latest drivers, as I've heard that it sometimes installs older versions of driver etc...

 

Hi...

Sorry to intrude into this discussion. I just wanted to know more about this Rapid Boost s/w from Lenovo. Is this only something that works on the newer gen ThinkPads and not, for example, on the R400 and the X201?

Thanks

 

Only recent models are supported. See the README.TXT file.

John

 

That is what I seemed to gather when looking it up on the web. Thanks for the clarification.