Re: Satellite C855-1GN very slow performance - booting procedure takes 15min

Question

My sister bought a Satellite C855-1GN installed with Win7 64-bit last December (typical - 4 days out of guarantee now) and for sometime has found it getting slower and slower.
She asked me to take a look at it for her, and she is quite right, this laptop is appalling unresponsive for even the most basic of tasks like opening Windows Explorer, which takes over a minute to open.
It's a similar story for pretty much any button press on this machine, sometimes longer depending on what has been clicked. Even getting the thing booted up from power button press to desktop being visible (let alone usable) takes a staggering 15 minutes plus.
Entering text such the password for user to login to Windows, or a URL in any browser (IE and chrome installed by default) results in the spinning circle equivalent to an egg timer for at least 60 seconds before anything happens, as does pretty much any button click. For example, Windows start button or right click on anything whatsoever.
Initially I suspected some kind of malware / too much rubbish installed. Ran full scans, no issues. Disabled / uninstalled all of the bloatware I could find, still no difference.
Shut down all power saving features, still appallingly slow.
Windows Experience / Task Manager / resmon all report nothing out of the ordinary nor anything eating resources. Out of desperation, reset to Out Of Box Experience condition using the hidden recovery partition... which took over 24 hours to complete, and that's not an exaggeration.
I went to bed, then to work for the day, and it still hadn't finished until I'd been home for a couple of hours.
This machine now has a completely fresh (albeit Toshiba specific) Win7 install, and runs just as horrifically slowly. I'm still waiting for desktop, 17 minutes after powering it on before typing this. It's had several reboots, and is not still installing anything.
6GB of RAM is more than ample. Whilst not a P3, 5 or 7, there is no way that an Intel B950 dual core processor running at an admittedly not top class 2.10GHz can be this slow (especially as it wasn't until a few months ago), I've had awful Celerons in my time which have been infinitely faster than this.
Has anyone else had similarly pathetic performance from this model? If so, we're any of you able to resolve it? Or should we just bin this paperweight?

Answer 1

Hi
In the past we have discussed many times about similar issues and some people were not satisfied about performance of brand new notebooks preinstalled with original recovery image.
As small example you can check this thread. Generally speaking there is described what you should do with this machine. You must, I like to use word optimize, preinstalled operating system. It will definitely run better and faster.
Other way there can also be problem with HDD. If your sister likes this machine I recommend you a small investment in new hardware. Exchange HDD with SSD. SSDs are not so expensive anymore so you can buy one, I would say, with 250GB and I think it is enough free space for their work.
You cannot imagine how fast they are. I use one on my old P500. Notebook starts in 40 seconds only.
Im pretty sure with new SSD and optimized original Win7 that you got with this notebook your sister will have good and pretty fast machine.