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I have a very strange problem with my fresh install of Windows 7 Profesional, 64bits on my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 :

The overal performance is very slow, the disk is constantly spinning, even without any program running (after boot, no other programs installed).

The boot process is very slow itself (4-5 minutes).

I mention that the laptop was fine on XP until the upgrade.

Thanks !

Additional info (as requested by the comments) :

  • 2GB RAM
  • Yes, I added all the manufacturer (Lenovo) drivers and updates (using the utility provided by Lenovo)
  • Tried with both 32 and 64 bits editions. The 32 bits one is performing a little better, but not very usable either.
  • The hdd has enough space (20 GB or so)
  • The problem is still present on a fresh install, so no recycle bin emptying or unistall programs (there aren't any except plain 7) would help. I'm not a newbie, so no obvious causes are left unchecked
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  • Whats the RAM size? Did you try to reset the BIOS? Is there enough free space on the drive?
    – jon
    Commented Jan 30, 2011 at 18:38
  • @ bogdanf, You need to edit your original post to include more information if you would like a more informed answer.
    – Moab
    Commented Jan 30, 2011 at 19:45
  • Have you installed the current motherboard/hard drive controller drivers for your latop/Windows 7?
    – Steve
    Commented Jan 31, 2011 at 8:47
  • When you say "the disk is constantly spinning", do you mean that the hard drive light is on solid even after 15-20 minutes of sitting idle? That shouldn't be the case, even on a clean system with only 1 G of RAM.
    – Jason R. Coombs
    Commented Jan 31, 2011 at 13:27
  • @boddanf, please log into your regular account when trying to add more info :)
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Jan 31, 2011 at 14:18

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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Try to run defragmentation. I have seen this helping a lot in some cases. Windows 7 supposedly runs this regularly by itself, but maybe someone disabled it or something.

Empty your Recycle Bin. (They used to call it trash can, why not any more?)

Go to your control panel, 'add and remove programs' and get rid of as much stuff as possible. Especially if you have some adware, demos or plain unused programs. If it is your own computer and you kind of know your way around, you can usually get rid of almost everything you don't know.

If this still does not help, you might want to try TuneUp Utilities. There is a 'one-click' option that should do it. There is a free trial and I have seen some cases where it helped.

If these software tricks don't help, you should try to update your hardware. On a laptop, you can usually update your hard drive and memory. I would go for the hard drive first, but more memory won't hurt, either.

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2 gigs is not a lot. Could it be that it is slow because... it is slow? ))

You might want consider an upgrade. First of all, T61 can easily take 8 gigs (2*4): http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Unofficial_maximum_memory_specs

Hurry! DDR2 RAM keeps getting stupidly expensive!

Secondly, what's your CPU? The fastest CPU that will fit your machine is T9500, but that's way too expensive. I'd go for T8100 or even T9300 (usually around $64 on eBay).

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Two things that might explain the disk activity:

  • If you use automatic windows update, a fresh windows 7 has a few hundred megabytes of updates to install. Downloading and installing them could take a while.
  • Windows 7 has a file indexing service running, the first index generation could take some time, especially if other things (antivirus, windows update) are heavily using the disk at the same time.
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Same problem here with a 4 GB of RAM on a Thinkpad 400. Go to Task Manager and click on the button Show processes from all users at the bottom left. You must be admin to see it I think.

Then sort by CPU usage.

I found svchost using 50% of my cpu. It was Windows Update doing something in the background. You can stop it and see if it's better. If it is, you can reset Windows Update with this script. Save it in a .bat file and run as admin.

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
rd /s /q %windir%\softwaredistribution
net start bits
net start wuauserv
wuauclt.exe /detectnow

Update (few days later)

I found the answer here somewhere. I needed a special patch Windows6.1-KB3050265-x64.msu. This fixed the 50% cpu usage. I could apply 70 patches after this one.

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