Thinkpad Edge E430 slowed down to a crawl

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?

iber

Posted 2014-05-18T12:53:57.710

Reputation: 11

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 – 2014-05-18T13:15:20.147

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

Answers

Did you try and run a benchmark software on it? It is a long shot, but you might get lucky with a report pinpointing the exact problem. You are pretty fortunate that you have two identical laptops, so comparing the reports should give you at least some idea.

arch-abit

Posted 2014-05-18T12:53:57.710

Reputation: 455

Actually the laptops aren't all that identical. They're both E430 but mine's a newer model (i5 3rd, 2GB + 4Gb aftermarket, 500GB, Intel HD 4000(thanks to 3rd gen)). – iber – 2014-05-18T17:45:50.570

How long back did you re-install Windows? It doesn't take very long to frag itself.

I use UltraDefrag (opensource) on 32 & 64bit machines to very good effect. The download is from Sourceforge - you can fully trust it. It can defrag the Windows System32 folder on boot up and do a Full Optimization/Quick Optimization of any drive, partition or folder manually. The install includes a reasonable help system.

It may or may not sort your problem out, but is still a useful Windows add-on, far superior to the built-in defrag utility.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the developers. I just recommend it :-)

Regards, dkp

dkp

Posted 2014-05-18T12:53:57.710

Reputation: 11