Slow boot with

Hi,

I have recently acquired an OCZ Vertex 2 80 gb hard disk for my T410i (old hard disk died). After installation with recovery disks, however, the booting speed was still rather slow (55 seconds)

At the beginning of the boot some lines of text appeared before windows initiated. Since I'm a computer noob, I have no idea what they are. I was hoping that some of you more educated fellows can help me troubleshoot.

For your information these are the full specs of my T410i:

i3-280 (2.52 Ghz)
2Gb ram
Win 7 HP 64 bit
Windows experience index: 3.9 (HD: 5.9) I'm mentioning this because read on the web that someone who had the same hard disk scored near 7 - is that indicative of any problem?

Moreover, I have taken a video of the boot. It can be downloaded here:
Hotfile.com: One click file hosting: Booting video.AVI

Many thanks!

 

any help please?

 

Sorry man, I have no experience with OCZ SSD drives, yet. If you haven't already, I would search or post at OCZ Forum - Home.

Good luck

 

Make sure you have set AHCI mode (not "Compatibility") for the SATA mode in BIOS. Also, alter the boot order to make your SSD first device in the boot priority sequence - this way you can get rid of the delay related to Intel Boot Agent initialization.

 

And I wouldn't concern myself too much with 55 second boot times.

download AS SSD and Crytal Disk Mark. Both are good SSD benchmarks. Run those and tell us what you find.

 

What else drove down that WEI score?

Do you have any network shares or other network issues that might be slowing down portions of the boot? How about any other devices that are connected? And is it set to go right into Windows without pausing to show the OS menu selection?

 

Thanks for your excellent advice. The boot time went down 3 seconds after I followed your instructions

 

Make sure the OS is aligned on the SSD, depending on how you install the OS some procedures forgoes this procedure and can actually affect performance. Use the Alignment Calculator to make sure its in line. Personally I tend to prefer install my Windows from scratch rather than using recovery disks/cloning software.

Also try updating the firmware of the OCZ drive using the OCZ Toolbox if you haven't done so. You could toggle the startup using MSConfig and disable the least important programs to save resources and time.

Another note is that you could try bumping up the RAM since 2GB RAM is borderline on a 64 bit OS system nowadays, depending on your usage you may find that your system will have to borrow the drive to make up the lack of RAM thus affecting performance. Additional RAM would free up resources from the drive and possibly increase performance, an extra 2GB RAM is actually not that expensive the last time I looked.

 

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Are these results considered normal? They certainly don't match the advertised speeds from OCZ...

 

The WEI 3.9 came from the graphics, which was not surprising considering that it had the previous generation of intel integrated graphics.

I have a network drive at my workplace associated with the laptop but as far as I noticed, the booting speeds have been consistently slow regardless of where my location was.

It is not set right into Windows without pausing since I have a password. But that should be a minor delay only. Many users have reported less than half of the time needed to boot...

I suspect there might be something wrong with my windows 7 installation process or the SSD itself that led to such poor performance?

 

Not good. Please read "tips and tweaks for SSDs" from Win7 forums.

I don't have the link on this computer but google should do it for you.

Your alignment is good and I particularly like the MSAHCI driver (Iastor...Intel doesn't really work for me) so that is good. But you likely don't have write cache enabled and there may be another thing or two you should fix.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions.

1. It is aligned according to the calculator in your link.
2. Actually I prefer that too but regrettably I do not have a copy of windows with me and I don't like the idea of spending $200 on that.... By the way, if I am a student, is there a way that I can get Windows 7 for free/ at a cheap price? Can this Windows 7 Student Discount be used to do a clean install and on how many computers can I do that?
3. OCZ toolbox and msconfig: will do
4. Actually I've gotten myself a new X220 and I'll receive it in a day or two. I'll also a 4gb ram from newegg to put into the X220 so the 2gb that it comes with will be with my T410i. Hope it helps, and I'll let you guys know if there's any improvement!

Thanks again!

 

It does seem a bit low, the last time I checked my OCZ Vertex 2 drive it outperformed the Intel X25-M I had in my T61 (uncapped) shown below. Your drive should be able to be roughly on par or exceed the figures below:



Even so, the problem with OCZ is that they shipped some Vertex 2 drives with 25nm chips that are considerably slower than the original 32nm drives without warning. There's no easy way distinguishing the two and for a while they were quite unsympathetic about it (they did charge a fee to do a swap for the original 32nm version which caused quite an uproar among some OCZ Vertex 2 owners).

Network Drives and Login Passwords will definitely increase your boot time. Even if you're not in your work domain your system will scan for the network drive everytime you boot up. The best way to bypass this is create a Shortcut to the network drive, not a permanent link usually on the "Computer" section. You still have access to the Network drive when you go to work but it won't scan for it everytime you boot up which is convenient and saves time for say you're working at home for example.

Since you already have a Windows 7 license (OEM) you could download your own clean copy of Windows 7 legally from this thread.

 

Do you mean this thread?

And how do I enable write cache etc? Wow it seems that there's a lot to do with SSDs in order to optimize their speed. I will have an Intel 310 40 gb and X220 arriving soon, hope I'll manage to make them work...

 

If you are in an engineering program, you can get Windows 7 Professional for free I'm pretty sure. There are a lot of nice perks to being in the engineering department.

 

Unfortunately I'm not... unless medicine counts too

So I'll have to pay $200 bucks just to do a clean install? Sad...

 

You can try asking the tech people on campus of something to find out more. If you can't get it for free, I'm sure you can pick up a copy for something like $50 or something with student discounts.

 

i think u can simply use the activation code on your laptop
all you need is a copy of the installation disk

 

Trace Windows 7 boot/shutdown/hibernate/standby/resume issues - MSFN Forum

 

Any tips on how to achieve these awesome figures? I'm having too the Intel X-25M 80GB with all the latest drivers, firmware and essential tweaks, etc. but my results are way too low - please see the screenshot. Even the JJB Tweak seems to make no difference Thanks!