Optimizing X220 Tablet for speed with standard HDD

So I moved my SSD to my Alienware, and went back to my 320GB 7200RPM drive. It takes longer than a minute to boot into windows 7 ultimate X64 (and on that note, it took 32 seconds to get into Windows on the mSATA SSD when it was in there), and I don't have a lot of things installed on here. Startup programs aren't very many, but I've been thinking about this lenovo enhanced experience 2.0 sticker on my palmrest. What is it lenovo does to make the system faster? Or anything general I can do to speed up my system? I have 8GB of RAM which is plenty for the light work this rig does. I don't know what else I can optimize to reduce boot and shutdown times.

 

mSATA SSD. My X220 boots in under 20 seconds.

 

As previously stated, I had a mSATA SSD. It booted in 32-40 seconds most the time, never anything faster then that.

 

Are you running the original OS install? If so, a clean install will help some. There's a lot of background stuff with the factory image, but a hard drive can't compare to a SSD. If I recall correctly, disabling TPM in the BIOS will shave a few seconds off the boot time, maybe more on a HDD, which takes longer.

 

Both installs on the HDD and the SSD were clean. I already had the TPM disabled.

 

1 minute to boot up seems normal time for a factory image, Lenovo has ALOT of stuff running. Go to msconfig and turn everything off on Startup. My X220 tablet with the factory Intel 160GB SSD booted to Windows in like 15 seconds after disabling alot of stuff, it probably would have been faster with a clean install. 8 GB RAM is meaningless about startup/shutdown speed, that is all I/O and you are bottlenecked by the spinner.