Typical boot times for x201 (w/o SSD)

Does anyone know what the average boot time for the Lenovo Thinkpad x201 is for models without SSD drives? I just received one with an i5-540M and a 7200 RPM drive and it takes about 70 seconds from press on to the windows desktop.

I do notice that it spends 10 seconds on the welcome screen, but I was led to believe that Lenovo was trying to reduce boot times, not increase them.

 

that depends on what sort of programs you are running at the startup. 50 to 70 sec is the average time for platter hdd. You can get longer starting up time, if your hdd has lots of programs running in the background.

 

What stops you of using sleep/standby feature? You won't have to wait that much.

I could see though how annoying is to wait 1min every time you start your laptop.

 

It also depends on how you count the machine as "ready". Some people will wait until the drive absolutely stops paging, which can take several minutes. I'm one of those folks that, once the desktop is up, I'll try to start interacting with it. On my SSD-equipped Y460, the drive has basically stopped anyway by the time the desktop is available; my platter-equipped Dell Inspiron E1505 with Win7, it's actually still pretty usable about five seconds after the desktop is visible, even though the drive light continues to churn.

 

70 seconds doesn't seem all that bad of a boot time, if you're counting from the moment you press the power button... do you have a password at boot? Enabling password-protected-logon in Windows does increase boot time, even not counting the time it takes for you to type in your password.

 

Check in the Windows forum to see some boot up times for HDDs, hybrids (Seagate), and SSD. It doesn't matter what computer it is in...

 

Well after seeing their video on how they optimized the startup process, cutting the time down by 40-50%, I was expecting something faster than the default... where in contrast it is actually slower because of the extra apps.

 

Well, that's really another thing about all these 'features' on your laptop. The extended capabilities of your function keys? Those all require apps. If you don't need or want those functions, you can disable them from starting and save yourself a lot of pain during boot. But then you're missing functionality that you might otherwise need or want...

I've disabled quite a few of those myself, but things like Fn+F5 (wireless and bluetooth toggles) and Fn+F6 (disable trackpad) and my volume and energy key functions are all important enough to me that I kept them in my boot process.

 

I have changed the stock 7200rpm HDD for Corsair force 120 SSD and my booting time is slightly above 20 sec.

 

I never got the point why is everyone so interested in boot times. Why not just use hibernate. I reboot windows basically only if there needs to be an update applied or something similar.

The SSD is still much faster - that's given. But I was thinking what I am doing and basically I don't really need SSD.

Short little off-topic but related question: Does swapping out hard drive on Thinkpads voids the warranty?

I am asking because 1) sometimes I copy large amounts of data so I'd love to take it out to the little HD dock and directly copy that way instead through LAN; 2) I might have one on my own that I'd rather use. In particular I'm wondering about X201.

 

Hibernating on my T500 is barely quicker than a cold boot - standby, though, is almost instantaneous.

Nope, not at all. In fact, it's recommended that you take out the hard drive when you send your computer in for non-hard-drive related issues.

 

Why use 8Gb of my disk space and 15 seconds to enter hibernation, when I can shut down in four seconds and cold boot six seconds faster than resume-from-hibernate on my SSD?

The point I'm trying to make here is that a full reboot will always end up being necessary for some reason or another. I find that the extreme speed of opening files, applications, maps in games, and VMWare images along with the obvious radical improvement in boot and shutdown times is entirely worth the price for me.

That is not to insinuate that it's right for everone, however

 

Well... 8 GB of space is a lot if you have skinny SSD . But I mean with regular HD, hibernate works just fine - at least I have been using it nicely. For SSD, yeah they are blazing fast but I don't like the low capacity vs regular HDs. Unless you are prepared to cough up $$$ for at >=256 GB one.

 

I guess it would depend on your needs. If you just need a machine to go on the internet, type up an occasional document or listen to some music, you probably don't need much space. If I'm at home, I have access to all stuff via the network. If I'm mobile I can put most of what I need on my external.

 

Yeah. Also my friend just pointed out to me, I had no idea it's possible to even buy 32GB USB keys for ~$60 as an alternative lightweight storage. Pretty decent if you want to put up movies/mp3s to listen to when you're traveling.

I'm actually calculating right now which SSD would be good for what you wrote + installations of some other stuff that I use (Mathematica, MATLAB, My Documents, etc.). 48GB that you have (interesting capacity btw!) might seem too tight for me.

 

I've got a 120GB Vertex 2 Extended drive in my Y460. I've got Win7 Pro 64, Office 2010 Pro 64, Visual Studio 2010, probably a hundred office documents of various flavors, about four dozen Visual Studio projects, Fallout 3 GOTY edition, Just Cause 2, Crysis and Warhead, and a few CD's worth of music.

I still have ~60Gb of free space left. So, to tell me that I need to find a "large" hard drive for my laptop to be usable? Pfft