Thinkpad Edge E440 Random Lags, Stuttering, Latency Problem.

Question

Dear All, I bought Thinkpad Edge E440 almost two weeks ago. The problem is it randomly lags and stutter without reason. For example I was writing documents on Microsoft Word, plays music on foobar2000 and doing some light browsing (only few tabs) but randomly the music lags for 1-2 seconds. It doesn't skip, it lags or stutter (sorry I don't know the right term). Also sometime it took awhile to open a new tab on firefox web browser while usually it took instantly.
Another example is I play two online games, World of Tanks (WoT in short, a tank simulation game) and Ghost Recon Phantoms (a shooting game). When I play both game, the gameplay went smooth but randomly it lags or stutter like 1 second on more, then it went smooth again and then stutter again. The game doesn't became slow (which is called FPS drop if I am not wrong), the display just stop moving and mouse/keyboard become unresponsive during the lag/stutter period. On the other hand I also played WoT on my Pentium 4 PC and it went smooth without any lags, though of course the settings is inferior to my E440 laptop (Ghost Recon Phantoms can't be played on my Pentium 4 so I won't compare it).
Also sometimes the audio sounds 'spiky'.
As I searched online, people said that this is called/related to Latency problem and I should use LatencyMon to check it. After using LatencyMon I found several 'culprits' which causes big latency such as NDIS.sys, ACPI.sys, ATAPORT.sys, storport.sys, etc. I also tried to disable cpu throttling, power management settings and such but the problem doesn't go away.
I am sure that there is something wrong with my hardware because if its caused by settings such as cpu throttling, power management (which I think is software-related) then won't this happen to everybody? I mean, I asked a fellow E440 user and he said that his laptop is fine and my problems doesn't occur on him.
I have phoned Lenovo Customer Service. I was using Windows 7 Ultimate. At first they told me to do clean reinstall and install the drivers in the order the CS give me. I did clean reinstall 4 times to try different driver and program installation sequence to see if I might find a way to fix my problem, but I found no solution (I tried Lenovo CS driver install order on the last clean reinstall). I even tried running LatencyMon after clean reinstall before installing any drivers or updates but the LatencyMon still reports big, 'unhealthy' latency.
Lenovo CS then told me to do hardware scan on Lenovo Solution Center. There are warning on the Nvidia GT740M stress test but the CS told me that the results are good. His last solution is that I should go to a Lenovo Service Center to check for the problem there.
I moved to Windows 8.1 to see if the problem will be solved but too bad it's not. I have ran hardware scan for 5 times, there are two times(or 3 times I forgot) that there is warning on Harddisk SMART short self-test, 2 times warning on Nvidia GT740M stress test, one time scan finished with no warning. Even so, the end result for all the tests is 'Passed'.
I think the problem lies within my harddisk (or something related to data transfer) since when I browse my local drive in windows explorer sometimes it took a long time for the icons to load but sometime it just loads instantly. And I am not sure what that Nvidia stress test warning has to do with.
Also I only use the stock 4GB Ram. Could this related to the problem? Though when I look at Windows 8.1 Task Manager the memory usage rarely goes above 60%.
Last but not least. I plug a wireless mouse on my laptop which I use mostly for playing games, but in the end I switches between mouse-touchpad-mouse and so on during working too. Sometime my touchpad suddenly went unresponsive for few seconds but my mouse is still usable during that moment. Then after I move my wireless mouse, my touchpad become responsive again. Any idea why this is happening? I think this is probably because touchpad driver not perfectly compatible with Windows 8.1 as I don't recall having this trackpad issue on WIndows 7.
Can somebody help me? Does anyone else ever had the same problem as I do?
I am sorry for the really long explanation. Your response will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
-Tahta

Answer 1

Hi All, sorry for being a while for a long time.
First of all, I should say that I am not sure if my trackpad/pointing device problem is related to the lag/stutter/latency problem so I should have made two different thread instead. Sorry if anyone got confused with this.
@rallygion, the first OS I used on this laptop was Windows 7 64bit. If I remember correctly I don't experience the trackpad/pointing device problem back then, maybe I was just forgotten tho. I am using Windows 8.1 starting sometime before I made this thread. Now the problem has gone worse, sometime the touchpad & red dot in the keyboard won't work for a whole day so I must use external mouse.
At first I thought its compability problem with Windows 8.1 but now I think the hardware has problem too. However, the keyboard is fully functional.
@waqs, thanks for your suggestion! Unfortunately it doesn't solve the lag/stutter/latency problem.
@ghasan, our problem is quite similar except I didn't use the M.2 SSD. One thing I notice is the disk activity sometimes jumps to 100% when the lags happened.
The problem doesn't lie with the laptop specification is inferior. Fyi, when I play music on foobar2000 it took few second for music to start playing (foobar says 'starting playback..') while on my pentium 4 desktop (which I still use) the music plays right after I clicked the song.
Also, eventhough I've closed all my applications, leaving only music player and microsoft word/firefox, the music which is playing lags (randomly stops for a moment).
The lags also happened when watching videos. I played video on Media Player Classic, turned the statistics on. There happen to be frame drops sometimes. Not framerate drop, just frame dropped. I mean, I think framerate dropping has relation with computer power while in my case the frame just randomly drops, which 'damages' the video, not slowing it down.
I am sure that this is hardware-related problem. I am going to take my laptop to service center but not now since I am in need on my laptop now.
I will give update later when I have gone to the service center.