slow Tecra A10

My Tecra A10 seems to have gotten slower over its life. I just reinstalled the OS, Windows 7 64-bit, and it still seems very slow. Launching any application seems slow. I tried to get some actual times. I would be interested in hearing what other people's timing tests show. Maybe someone else with a similar laptop can confirm that mine is very slow.

Reboot time: if you hit "restart", then start timing from the moment that the "logging off" screen appears (which actually takes a while in itself), these are the relevant times:

• for the desktop to first appear after the reboot: 2 minutes, 6 seconds (2:06)
• If I launch Firefox as soon as I get the taskbar to appear, the Firefox windows takes over another minute to show up: at 3:15
• Hibernating with one application running (Firefox) takes 35 seconds to the point of power off.
• Restore from hibernate takes 25 seconds.

I tried to get some other benchmarks, from running Performance Test 8:

The thing I'm most concerned about is the hard drive. Its a Toshiba 232 GB, ATA, 512 bytes per sector.

According to Performance Test 8, the disk benchmarks are

• sequential read: 51.9 MB/second
• sequential write: 50.7 MB/second
• random seek + R/W: 2.99 MB/second

I also ran some specs with Roadkill's Disk Speed Version 2.0

• overall score: 344.4
• Access time: 17.95 ms
• max read speed: 72.89 MB/sec
• cached speed: 109.81 MB/sec
• 0.5 KB blocks: linear read is 2.22 MB/sec, random read is 27.86 KB/sec (SEEMS REALLY LOW)
• 32KB blocks: linear read is 42.02 MB/sec, random read is 1.75 MB/sec
• 1024 KB blocks: linear read is 69.64 MB/sec, random read is 27.50 MB/sec

Some CPU and memory specs:

• Processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 @ 2.53 GHz
• front side bus is 1011 MHz
• cach: L1 instruction = 2*32 kb, L1 data = 2*32 kb, L2 = 1 * 3 MB
• memory: 1849 MB total physical. slot 1: DDR2 2048 MB 800 MHz

Thanks,
Mike

 

Full disclosure, I know very little of hard drives, but I'll attempt to be of some help.


I'm not sure how your current speeds stack up for a SATA-I drive; perhaps others can chime in here.


However, from looking up some generic Tecra A10 models, it looks like your laptop possibly has the "Mobile Intel GM45 Express" Chipset, which I believe is SATA-II compatible.
Toshiba Tecra A10-S3501 Specs - Laptops - CNET Reviews
http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/product/pdf_files/detailed_specs/tecra_A10-S3551.pdf
This link says it should support SATA-II [SATA 300]: Embedded Insights - Embedded Processing Directory - Intel Mobile GM45/GS45/GL40


Bootup times may be improved by installing a faster SATA-II drive over your current SATA-I drive. Perhaps try searching to see if your laptop can accept a SATA-II SSD drive for the fastest bootups times. [Although I've heard older SATA-I computers can have a size cap on the hard drives they can support; example 500GB or less].
As an alternative, installing additional RAM may help.


Good luck and keep us posted with any news

 

Well the main issue I want to try to resolve is whether it is malfunctioning. It seems much slower now than when new.

Upgrading the hardware is a separate issue. It's something I want to do, yes, so thanks for the info. I'll make a note of it when I start looking for updates.

Mike

 

If you want to know if the HDD is malfunctioning, please post full SMART status for us to analyze, for example from health tab of HDTune.
While you're at it run HDTune benchmark and post it here (benchmarks measure things differently and I am familiar with HDTune so that would be something for me to compare)

 

Thanks, I ran HDTune. The benchmark stats are as follows:

Read: min 1.7 MB/s, max 51.9 MB/s, avg 8.2 MB/s, access time 37.1 ms, burst rate 21.5 MB/s, CPU Usage 17.5%

file: transfer speed, sequential read was 23502 KB/s, write was 19391 KB/s
file: transfer speed, 4K random single: read 33 IOPS, write 74 IOPS
file: transfer speed, 4K random multi (widget reading was 32), read 57 IOPS, write 179 IOPS

The SMART status screenshot is here:

 

SMART status is OK- nothing there indicates imminent failure and nothing is wrong.

As for the benchmark- it really sucks. Toshiba mk2555gsx is by no means a fast HDD but average read speed should be no less than 40MB/s (and that is the worst case scenatio) and something like 55MB/s would be normal for this HDD. So 8MB/s is tragic to say the least.

Burst rate shgould be at least a 100MB/s and possibly more- so 21.5MB/s is way off.

Check info tab in HDtune- is the drive in UDMA5 mode? Also make sure that chipset drivers and that you have the latest version of Intel driver for your SATA AHCI controller (it comes with Intel Rapid Storage Technology package).

 

HDTune confirms the drive is in UDMA5. Windows 7, using the driver update option in the context menu (in the device manager) says that the AHCI controller is up to date, and I also checked drivers for every hardware item that I thought might be related to the hard drive, and they are all up to date.

Interesting development. I've run HDTune several times now, and I get wildly varying results. One time it had an average of around 50 MB/s and a burst of around 80 MB/s. Other times it is more like the first numbers I've posted. I'm doing some experiments to see if I can find a pattern. Is HDTune sensitive to background processes? Would the hard drive benchmark give a slower number when run just after system startup?

 

Yes, HDTune is sensitive to such things because if other apps use HDD at the same time it lowers the score.
Running HDTune immediately after startup would most likely affect the results since lots of things are starting, Windows Update may be checking for updates, AV software may do a startup scan and so on.

You may be interested in seeing what apps are using HDD and to what extent- see Performance monitor available through Process Manager.

 

I ran HDTune multiple times, and if I wait until the system is fully booted and no apps are running, I get an average rate of around 50 MB/s and a burst rate of 80 MB/s. So this is not too far off.

Since booting is one of the slow things, I used xbootmgr and xperf to get a trace of the bootup. I'm not quite sure how to read it, but in case you are interested, I attached it. It's an XML file but I have to rename it to a TXT file in order to upload it. You probably know this, but you can view it nicely in IE, with the ability to expand and collapse sections. It reports that almost every process that runs during the boot takes "unexpectedly long" but I'm not sure what that means, or how to read other sections of the report.

 

At first glance- the number of processes (and possibly services) is way too high. Check the list of things that have added themselves to startup and get rid of those that don't need to be there i.e. things from Adobe.

To be honest the list is too long to go through those one by one. How many processes does the Process Manager show right after boot?

 

I don't know if this is true of Toshibas in general, but my laptop came preloaded with an unbelievable number of startup items and services. They are related to things like the modem, several related to the function keys and volume control, health monitor, "eco," power saving, docking, many system tray controls that are probably unnecessary, and so forth. I removed everything that seemed to be unnecessary. There are a three drivers installed on my system beyond the original Win 7 install (two USB sound module drivers and a MIDI virtual cable driver) and these have startup processes.

So anyway, the process manager shows 64 processes right after reboot. This is after I got rid of everything that seems unnecessary (including the Adobe stuff).

 

Here's a Toshiba Support Bulletin that explains what each "Toshiba" software does. Most of the Tsohiba startup software can be safely disabled, but it is worth checking the list just to verify.
Content Details
Not sure if you have it or not, but if there is a startup item labeled "Value Added Package" or "Flash Cards", then keep that. The "Fn" keys depend on those software packages.


Good luck