Slowness with T500 and Vista Business 64

I've recently bought a T500 with Vista Business 64 bit. It takes a long time for Vista to boot, more than five minutes. Even when I didn't install any 3rd party software. It seems to be making excessive hard drive reads when loading the OS. The same goes for launching software such as Word. Lots of hard drive activity. Is this normal?

But once the OS and software is in memory, things seem to go fast. Anyone with similar issues? Any thoughts and suggestions?

thanks,

Agillette

 

I also found vista business (preload 32bit) very slow when starting. I finally changed to windows XP.

It's very fast now, although I cannot use the turbo memory in my T500.

 

ok! i agree!!!

i got the vista business 32bit and man i really think its slow. maybe i was expecting more but i think i just havent gotten rid of enough lenovo software. plus im thinking of getting 2bg more to make it 4gb ram and possibly go to 64bit.

 

How much memory do you have? Adding memory can always help. Also check out some Vista tweaking guides such as the one Les put together here.

 

If you didn't alter the initial configuration, there will be bloatware and other software pre-installed that will significantly slow things down.

I would suggest performing a clean format with a bloatware-less Windows install.

 

Boot into ThinkVantage button and do custom restore might help. Mine did uncheck every bloatware =] and run system update to have most of thinkpad software.

 

Does this excessive hard drive access happen after you have logged in and are the desktop, or before you login? If it's after you log in, it's probably SuperFetch doing its thing.

I was pulling my hair out for a while because the System process would take unusual interest in my Outlook PST file after boot up...so much so that no other processes could access the hard drive. My PST file is a few gigs so yeah, it pretty much killed my system during the time it was reading. I finally figured out that it was SuperFetch caching it into memory. You can either disable that and deal with some slower speeds later or just let it cache. It actually does speed things up, believe it or not. I normally never reboot and just use the sleep function, so this doesn't bother me too much but yeah, it's a PITA whenever I do reboot.

 

Thanks for all of your thoughts and suggestions. My laptop has 2gb of memory, which I thought would be enough for now. I don't think the memory is the problem. The excessive hard drive loading only happens when I'm launching or closing software. Once it's up an running, there is very little hard drive activity. Maybe it's the 5400k rpm drive. Any thoughts on SSD drives?

I'll try zerosource's suggestion about booting using ThinkVantage to remove bloatware.

 

I would also make the suggestion of disabling Superfetch. Unless you don't shut down your system often, you wouldn't get much of a benefit with it on.

 

hmm, re: superfetch, it's not related to turning the computer off often or not .. it 'learns' what programs you routinely load up, and at what times, etc. so turning it on/off really does nothing.

on the other hand indexing could be making your computer slow? i dont think you shoudl turn off superfetch unless you really know what it does and don't want it. it's one of the few new things from vista that work well

just my two cents.

 

In fact, 2GB is enough for vista basic but not business or ultimate, especially when Areo effect is enabled. A guy reported that when he increase his memory from 3GB to 4GB for T500, the vista runs faster.
Superfectch and the Areo effect are reasons for slowing down startup. I have noticed many many memory mistakes (when system are forced to turn to pagefile to read the context, a mistake is reported.) when vista business starts, in my T500 with 2GB memory.

 

I ran Vista Home Premium on my main rig with 1 GB of RAM for a little while, and it ran just fine with Aero enabled (I later upgraded to 3 to do more gaming). Vista doesn't need 1GB of RAM to operate. More memory gives the OS more head space, and allows for greater performance of everything. If superfetch is enabled, then it take advantage of the extra RAM.

When you turn your system on, superfetch will build up the cache. During that time, your HDD is very busy. Even though it's a "background process", any disk activity you need to perform will be slow, as the OS needs to schedule that disc activity, and move the physical head on the drive to the area of the disc containing the data you need to load. It's sort of like opening two apps at one time. As someone who frequently likes to hibernate Windows, I find that my hibernation resume speed (and startup speed) is noticeably faster without Superfetch enabled.

Indexing should not slow down your system. It really is a low priority process, and once an item is indexed, it's done. By default, only your home directories are indexed, so unless you are frequently adding and removing large amounts of files to the indexed locations, the indexer won't bother you.