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Windows 10 on Lenovo Thinkpad T410 too slow

Anonymous
2018-03-28T15:58:07+00:00

Greetings,

I've been looking for answers to improve the performance of Windows 10 on the T-410 (type 2516-A11). I bought this laptop with the top i7 VPro Core processor at the time because I wanted something fast that would remain fast as time went on, at least 10 years. I upgraded to Windows 8.1 and it worked well, but since moving to Windows 10, it runs terribly slow. Everything takes 25 seconds and longer just to respond to mouse clicks. I have increased the battery/power settings to run at maximum, I've removed/replaced virtual memory, cut out most of the programs at start up, changed the Advanced Settings to Best Performance, turned off search index to reduce HDisk activity, and did several other things (except unable to stop Windows Installer) to reduce the harddrive activity yet the harddrive continues to run hard too. I tried creating another Admin account and it seems a little better but still not tolerable. 

It doesn't give me the option to back out of the OS and the Lenovo Recovery to go back to Windows 7 Pro won't work. 

I see where others have had the same issues on the Thinkpad T-410 but I have been unable to find answers. 

It is very frustrating to have this machine and not be able to use it. Thanks in advance for anyone that can provide some help.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Performance and system failures

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  1. @CmdrKeene 90,621 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-03-28T16:05:15+00:00

    Check in Task Manager to see what program is actually using the hard drive.

    Anecdotally, I grabbed a few Lenovo Yogo from work when they were getting rid of old laptops. They kept and destroyed the hard drive, and I made the mistake of buying the cheapest, slowest, spinning-type drive.  It's got a ton of room, but man is it a slow dog.  I really should have opted for an SSD, at the very least a hybrid one so the OS could be snappy.

    As for some great suggestions:  I'd recommend this great page by another MVP.  I went through it this weekend trying to improve performance on an HP Stream laptop (a terrible device with only 30 GB of total drive space, yuck).  https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/26120-optimize-performance-windows-10-a.html

    Some of the things I did was disable indexing (it's used as a "email and web only" device by my parents, so there probably wasn't anything to get indexed anyway, but I still disabled it).  I also turned off superfetch (which also probably doesn't make much difference for speed since that computer DOES have an SSD drive, but I still turned it off regardless).

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  1. @CmdrKeene 90,621 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-03-29T00:42:13+00:00

    Hey bud thanks but I didn't write it. I run the site CmdrKeene.com with what I think are some cool tips for techies, but that forum with the performance tips was a guy named Shawn Brink who happens to be another mvp.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-03-29T00:40:29+00:00

    @Shawn... I did notice the 'great' author of the link you provided... It really is great. You did an excellent job documenting the steps for the changes and putting a landing page of all the steps in front of it. Nice work!!

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-03-29T00:34:03+00:00

    @JimWayne - 8GB RAM. 

    @Shawn. I went through and implemented a lot of the changes that were there, including the search/superfetch. I had tried those two before without success, then allowed them to run again.

    The one process that I happened to find running and using disk this time was the Lenovo PM Service (power mgt). I hadn't seen this use disk before while the disk was hammered. Mostly, I've seen "system" running the disk hard, and this time, the system had more disk than this process. 

    I shutdown the Lenovo PM service, then stopped the superfetch and search while I was in the Services section. It looks like the LPM Service may have been the culprit, and if not completely the culprit, combining that with disabling the superfetch and the search processes put this machine at the performance level that I expect it to be.

    This performance problem had me looking at buying an SSD but I didn't want to invest the money until I knew I was able to get this machine running reasonably well with the hdd. Given the speed, it will be fine with the hdd.

    It's nice to go from entering the password and getting the desktop instantly, versus waiting two minutes. I can't thank you enough for your help on this. I know that if I didn't ask, when I asked, that this problem wouldn't have gotten fixed.... and I've been working on it - on and off - for over four months.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-03-28T16:03:06+00:00

    How much RAM?

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