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We bought 2 thinkpad E430 systems in September 2012. They were running Windows 7 pretty smooth as the time but as it stands today, my dad's thinkpad has slowed down to a crawl.
Clicking on the start orb also takes about 4 seconds for the menu to show up.
Specs: i3 2nd gen, 2GB DDR3, 320GB(7200), Intel HD 3000, 14".
The hard drive is about half filled.
Solutions attempted: 1. Disk de-fragmentation. 2. Removal of unnecessary software. 3. Virus Scan. 4. Windows re-install (vanilla win7 x86 SP1) 5. Lenoovo diagnostics.
All done but no use.
I believe the HDD is the bottleneck here but the SMART status is fine in Lenovo diagnostics. Any solutions as to why this is happening and how to correct it?
Dust collecting around the fans can cause the CPU to throttle down due to overheating. Often opening up the laptop and cleaning out all the dust can help. Your manufacturer should hopefully have a guide as to how to dismantle your laptop and clean your fans. – Mokubai – 2014-05-18T12:58:00.173
@Mokubai Agreed. But the laptop is really slow even at non CPU intensive tasks such as opening the file explorer. – iber – 2014-05-18T13:09:52.047
The next thing to check would be the power management plans and make sure that it hasn't accidentally been set to a power saving mode: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_manual_act_win7 Otherwise you can use the resource monitor to see what is using CPU or disk: http://www.pcworld.com/article/241677/how_to_use_resource_monitor.html
– Mokubai – 2014-05-18T13:15:20.1471
post a pic of the all processes running. Bootup in safe mode to see if the slow down continues... if it does not then try using sysinternals autoruns http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb963902.aspx to find and remove unwanted startup applications.
– Logman – 2014-05-18T14:00:22.507