Offloading ReadyBoost/Swap to a USB 2.0 Flashdrive.

[Cyber Akuma]

I have a fairly old laptop that is very unresponsive. It takes forever to login and to start applications. I have done everything else I can think of, within budget, to try to optimize it:

 

Replaced the 5400RPM drive with a 7200RPM one when the original 5400 drive failed (SSD was just too expensive)

 

Upgraded the RAM to 8GB

 

Disabled most of the appearance effects in windows Performance settings

 

Cleared out junk files

 

Defragmented the harddrive

 

Disabled any non-important or non-essential services/apps from startup.

 

But it's responsiveness is still miserable, and I am pretty sure it's the harddrive (defraggler benchmarked it's random read speed at about 3.2MBps, that's pretty low). I was thinking about using a flashdrive for both readyboost, and to put the swap file on, to see if it would help. Issue is, the system doesn't have USB 3.0 ports AFAIK. Would a USB 2.0 drive even help at all? Especially since, due to the intent being that it would stay plugged into the system, I would need one of those nano-sized ones that are barely the size of the USB port itself so it wouldn't accidentally get off. Aren't those even slower than a normal Flashdrive though? Would using a Nano USB 2.0 flashdrive even give any performance difference at all?

[TPreston]

On average flash drive memory will be slower than your HDD so no

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

What is the brand and model of the laptop, and what is the brand and model of the hard disk drive?

 

Also, what version of Windows are you running?

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[spaceelf]

8 hours ago, TPreston said:

On average flash drive memory will be slower than your HDD so no

For paging it's actually pretty slick.  Not for the actual page file mind you as I don't think Windows allows that and it'd probably thrash the drive, but ReadyBoost can definitely help.

 

Though, if the hard drive is that bad, it'll still take some time to populate the flash drive and do anything involving writes in Windows.

 

As for nano drives I really have no idea.  They probably don't have great perf since they'd need to dissipate heat one way or another.

[Cyber Akuma]

1 hour ago, goretsky said:

Hello,

 

What is the brand and model of the laptop, and what is the brand and model of the hard disk drive?

 

Also, what version of Windows are you running?

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

 

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite C655D. The harddrive is a HGST Travelstar 7K1000 500GB.

 

Windows 10 Home.

[T3X4S]

Is the HDD new ?

If it is, you should still look for bad sectors.  (HDD Tune)
If all sectors are OK, and no SMART errors, then go into BIOS - see if AHCI is enabled and not IDE.
(You might have to make some registry changes before editing BIOS setting)

If AHCI was enabled, and it doesnt have some weird power setting (like Energy Saver) 

Then possibly a re-install of the OS is needed.
If you re-install the OS, and the problem is still there - your only other option is to try another HDD.

If your original HDD was corrupted, and you simply cloned it over to a new HDD, then you could have cloned the corruption, too.

I recently had to reimage someone's desktop, installed Win10 and it ran horribly.
I was having licensing issues, so I put win7 on it.
Ran just as bad.  Looked in BIOS, it was set to IDE.
Made the necessary changes - all problems went away.

[Cyber Akuma]

Yes , it actually replaced the dying original 5400RPM HDD in the system a few months ago. I am PRETTY sure I ran scans on it before using it to make sure.

[T3X4S]

18 minutes ago, Cyber Akuma said:

Yes , it actually replaced the dying original 5400RPM HDD in the system a few months ago. I am PRETTY sure I ran scans on it before using it to make sure.

Like your avatar BTW - the DIMM for cross bones is clever.

Well, if the HDD is good, did you clone the corrupted image directly over to the new drive, or do a clean install on the new HDD ?

You could try doing  sfc/scannow from an elevated cmd prompt...
But, check the IDE settings in BIOS, before you do the sfc/scannow.

Im logging off for the night, but will check back tomorrow if you haven't gotten anywhere.

Good Luck

[Cyber Akuma]

I cloned it, but the original drive wasn't corrupted, it was just starting to die with SMART errors and horrible latency/freezing.

 

I'll check the IDE settings and do a scandisk once this defragmentation finishes.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

From reading up on the now six-year-old Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5300 I see that it contains an AMD E-240 or a E-350 CPU, which were from a series of low-end processors designed for netbooks.  So, even when the system was new, it wasn't a speed demon.  I have some systems with similar processors (2×ThinkPad X100e, X120e, X140e) and I know they certainly work fine even today, so the performance characteristics you reported with the drive seem way out of line to me.

 

My suspicion is that since it was cloned from a failing drive, a problem might have occurred during the cloning process with making a reliable copy of the operating system.

My suggestion would be to download the bootable version of the Hitachi Global Storage Technology's Drive Fitness Test program and use that to run a full battery of diagnostics against the drive and then wipe it completely.  When that's finished, go ahead and do a clean installation of the operating system.

 

If possible, you'll want to use the recovery media that came with (or you made for) the notebook computer to install the operating system, since I recall getting the various drivers installed was something of a pain.  That said, you can find some of the device drivers here on Toshiba's support site, and there may be some newer video drivers here on AMD's support site (look at the bottom of the E Series APU section), as well as updated drivers here on AMD's support site for AHCI, chipset, RAID and USB support.  You'll want to make use of Windows Update to get the operating system and other device drivers updated, as well.

 

Once you've got your installation of Windows updated, go ahead and reinstall your applications and restore your data from your backups, and I think you'll find that old laptop runs a lot better than it has for a long time.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky