Lenovo B50-30

[Paul Cummins]

But put your swap on the 1TB drive, not the SSD.

[Paul Cummins]

Then don't use Linux.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

I have asked to look at the above, which sort of runs, but in treacle mode. Takes forever to boot up, press a button and it will maybe respond 5 minutes later.

It has Win10 installed on it, it seems to have a reasonable spec. I'm wondering if there should be a recovery CD for it, or if anyone knows where I could download from and burn a CD?

[John_j]

"Harry Bloomfield"; "Esq." [e-mail]> wrote in message news:r3m5mi$b5j$ [e-mail]...

[Chris Bartram]

Just download an ISO of win 10. I'd expect a machine of that vintage to work without many extra drivers.

It'll still be slow though. How much RAM?

[Theo]

It's a Celeron N2840 CPU and the whole laptop sold for 200 quid in 2014. It has a cpubenchmark.net scope of 1000, compared to a decent modern laptop score of 12000.

You can try, but I wouldn't expect much better than treacle.

Theo

[John Rumm]

There is a party trick I have seen some of these play where they throttle back to a very low clock speed all the time. Going into the BIOS and resetting to default BIOS settings will fix that one. (might also be worth checking for BIOS upgrades while you are at it).

Having said that, its a slow machine to start with. About the only thing you can do to make any real difference would be to clone the HDD onto a SSD.

It will have a recovery partition. So you can recover to the supplied image (which is unlikely to be Win 10).

Failing that you can download Win 10 from MS - just search for download Win 10. That will get you the media creation tool which will either upgrade the machine its being run on, or let you write a boot image to USB or DVD.

For the utilities etc, there will likely be a tag number of some kind on it that you may be able to use on the Lenovo web site to take you to the right set of utilities.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

It seems to be reporting 4gb

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

John Rumm formulated the question :

I have managed to run the recovery utility and its faster initially then gradually comes to a complete stop. It has a few unnecessary things on it, which are grabbing memory and CPU, but I have been unable to stop or delete them so far.

[The Natural Philosopher]

before you go mad, use the SMART disk utilities (HDtune) to see if the disk is, in fact, failing.

[John_j]

That wouldn?t normally produce that very long delay for a keystroke to happen.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

If it came pre installed often its hidden in a secret partition on the drive. Have you been able to look what crapware is running at start up? Can it run in safe mode or whatever Microsoft call it this week? Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

It should not be that slow then, unless its got a disc full of crap. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Well it should be faster than mentioned though. One thing to watch out for on these cheaper machines is a terribly small hard drive. This often means that when you get a new version of windows as you do every 6 months or sooner, there is just not enough space to actually properly install and configure it. Its probably OK for simple word processing,email or browsing text only sites using the new Chrome Edge.

Brian

[polygonum_on_google]

Have the Lenovo drivers, etc., been installed? Probably needs Lenovo Vantage installed to do that properly. The process of finding and installing updates usually works fine. It can make a huge difference.

[Chris Bartram]

Don't bother. It'll struggle. Slow processor, not enough RAM, probably a

5400rpm spinning rust drive.

[T i m]

Before you go there, have you checked to see if there is more than one AV program? Or anything else that looks 'iffy'?

A good experiment in these cases is to boot a Linux DVD / USB and just check to see if the machine runs 'normally' (=as expected for the spec).

If it does (and I'm *not* advocating installing Linux instead of Windows here <g>) then you could try creating an additional user, logging out of the std user and logging back in as the new user and seeing if anything has changed. If it has (if it's faster / as expected) then the chances are it's something to do with the std user.

If it's not it's likely to be a system problem and depending on how much data and how many 'licensed programs are on there, you may try to fix that installation or just do a fresh one.

A std W10 install disk would probably be fine on that and the W10 Media Creation Tool and a >4G USB stick is all you need.

You can use the tool to create the image on another W7+ PC (you just need to tell it that's what you are doing) and away you go.

If it's already running W10 it should re-authenticate itself automatically when you go online.

It might be worth checking what version of W10 (Home / Pro, 32/64 bit) before you re-install (System, General tab).

Cheers, T i m

[alan_m]

Unfortunately I cannot find the web page I used to disable a lot of Win10 eye candy features.

It did include deleting some of the pre-installed MS programs (or apps as they like to call them now) Things like their news app which has an animated icon and in reality is constantly trying to download news from the internet in the background. There are few more apps like this which may not be required.

There is a lot of graphic features that can be disabled in favour of performance, especially on an older machine

It may also be worth running a cleaner/optimisation program such as CCleaner (free trial)

Is there more than one real time virus checker running? If so they may be fighting each other in that they are both constantly checking any files each of the other checker may be creating. Win 10 comes with an inbuilt virus checker but PC manufacturers are fond of bundeling another. A second virus check could be put into manual mode and removed from the startup list to see if it improves Win 10 performance.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

on 03/03/2020, Brian Gaff (Sofa 2) supposed :

Difficult to tell, its so slow it doesn't allow you too investigate what's on the HDD.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

alan_m pretended :

It looks as if there are two, but so slow its impossible to progress it to a check..

If only I could get to the startup.