New i7 (Acer) still seems kinda slow

[Langkawi]

Hi All,

So I'm the proud owner of a very shiny new Acer 8943G and whilst it's early days am very pleased with loads of aspects of the new lappy compared with my old HP Pavillion DV9500. HD screen and whatnot are cracking.

However, I'm not finding the machine as fast as I expected and well, not that fast at all really.

Perhaps I'm just being speed greedy but for £1,200 quid I was expecting some real zip.

Power on to Windows password - approx 20 secs
Password entry to ready to use - approx 15 secs

These I can cope with but what's really annoying me is that if I'm using say Windows media to listen to music and I click on another icon - say Firefox - it takes around 10/15 seconds to respond and then load.

All in all I'm not finding this much faster than my 3 year old HP I replaced and I thought by getting an i7 CPU, faster bus speed, Windows 7 and 4GB RAM I'd be leaving the HP (Vista) for dead.

I'm toying with replacing the HDD with a fast SSD (many thanks to the US version of this site for the guide on how to do so) but will hold off for a few weeks as I want to ensure the Acer is problem free before I do anything that may invalidate the warranty.

I ran the Windows 7 Performance Issues tool from Control Panel but all it offered was that there are startup menu items that might be affecting performance. Most of which I've now disabled. But the lappy still doesn't seem that fast.

Is there anything else I need to look into or take into account in order to speed this baby up? Are the speeds I quote above about normal for such a hi-spec machine?

Or any other thoughts or advice that might help?

Many Thanks,
Alan

PS - I know adding more RAM might help but as best as I can tell the full 4GB is not getting used (as per the Task Manager monitor anyway). I'm willing to spend the money to upgrade if it helps but don't want to spend another few hundred quid to find out that there's no noticeable difference.

 

[buwish]

In regard to the RAM, it's a good thing that not all 4GB are not being used. If it was using all 4GB or near that, it would be impossibly slower than it is now. Have you tried uninstalling the bloatware that came with it? That would be a good start, as a lot of the bloatware runs in the background and can slow things down. Finally, what kind of hard drive is in it, i.e. a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive?

 

[Langkawi]

Thanks buwish,

Yeah, I guess that's a good start.

I haven't installed much on it so far, so I'm gonna revert to factory settings, run something like decrapify and then add just the good stuff that I need & want like Firefox, VLC, Comodo Security and whatnot.

Hopefully getting a decent foundation without all the rubbish will give some more impressive performance. Otherwise, well I guess I'll just have to post again on here!

Cheers,
Alan

 

[tsnor]

the WIN7 resource monitor is really good. type 'resource monitor' in the search box in the start menu (wihtout the quotes).

Look to see if CPU is pegged or disk. most likely disk.

Now look to see what is using the disk. Lots of stuff like disk indexing, downloading fixes, anti-virus etc. runs heavy in the background the first few days of operation.