W520 - slow boot?

[bnoobston]

Hi all,

I just got my w520 and I've noticed that it boots incredibly slow compared to other w520s. It takes nearly 2 minutes to load and is just annoying me because of what I paid for this laptop. The laptop is an i7-2720, 6gb ram, and 500 gb hdd and runs windows 7 enterprise. The bios version is 1.25.

I would appreciate any advice on how to optimize boot speed (and general processor speed) because it's just so much slower than I think it should be.

Thanks!

[huberth]

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bnoobston wrote:

Hi all,

I just got my w520 and I've noticed that it boots incredibly slow compared to other w520s. It takes nearly 2 minutes to load and is just annoying me because of what I paid for this laptop. The laptop is an i7-2720, 6gb ram, and 500 gb hdd and runs windows 7 enterprise. The bios version is 1.25.

I would appreciate any advice on how to optimize boot speed (and general processor speed) because it's just so much slower than I think it should be.

Thanks!

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You could set your BIOS to boot diagnostic mode. It may show you where the slowdown occurs. 

[bnoobston]

How would I go about doing this?

[huberth]

Holding F1 at boot-up will get you the BIOS menu.

[Exalt]

I'm having the same issue, i fixed it by filling all my memory slots with 4gig modules... now it takes only 1,20 secs to boot!

[bnoobston]

Where do you go inside bios? I looked but there was nothing that said diagnostic

[yongtw]

F1 enter BIOS, go to Startup. Change boot mode from Quick to Diagnostics

[bnoobston]

Tried it but nothing seems to have happened....any other suggestions? In my event viewer, it shows the boot time consistently as around 2:30 which is unacceptable for this type of laptop.

[huberth]

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bnoobston wrote:

Tried it but nothing seems to have happened....any other suggestions? In my event viewer, it shows the boot time consistently as around 2:30 which is unacceptable for this type of laptop.

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During the diagnostic boot, is there any point where it hangs for more than 20 seconds?

[harrisb]

Faster boot/load times can be had by by several routes:

1. Install BIOS 1.26  (allows CPU to get into TurboBoost on AC)

2. Replace the 2GB RAM dimm with a 4GB RAM dimm (dual channel memory offers 3-5% speed increase)

3. Install an mSata SSD 80GB (move OS and frequently used applications to SSD)

My system went from 2:50  in stock form (BIOS 1.25, 8GB RAM) to 47 secs (BIOS 1.26, mSata SSD + 8GB+ RAM).

Time to Windows 7 login 17 sec. (correcting typo)